Christos Tsiolkas > Quotes

“Homesickness hits hardest in the middle of a crowd in a large, alien city.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, Barracuda

“In reading he found solitude. In reading he could dispel the blare of the world.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, Barracuda

“In the three minutes it takes the song to play I'm caught in a magic world of harmony and joy, a truly ecstatic joy, where the aching longing to be somewhere else, out of this city, out of this country, out of this body and out of this life, is kept at bay.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, Loaded

“It is possible the world is divided into three genders - there are men, there are women and then there are women who choose to have nothing to do with children. How about men without children, he answered quickly, aren't they also different from fathers? She shook her head firmly, daring him to contradict her: no, all men are the same.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap

“Son, always answer back when you receive an insult. Do it straight away. Even if there’s a chance there was nothing behind it, take back control, answer them back. An insult is an attack. You must counter.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, Barracuda

“She did not want the pleasurable and comfortable mediocrity in which she now wallowed to be the sum of her life.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap

“I like being a faggot, mate, I like it a lot and I think being free in our middle age is what we deserve for straights making our childhood and our teenage years so cuntish.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, Barracuda

“The swing between confronting the dangerous or brutal and the beautiful or the kind is one of the elements of being human that I have battled with all my life. That mixture of love and savagery is there in every important relationship in our lives: with parents, siblings, lovers, our closest friends. I have always wanted to be faithful to that truth.”
― Christos Tsiolkas

“I hope for what I always hope for as a writer: a critical but kind reader. I think that is what we all hope for.”
― Christos Tsiolkas

“Regrets, of course; only an imbecile did not have regrets. Regrets, some shame, a little guilt. But they had all done the best they could, they had raised their children well, educated them, housed them, made them safe and secure. They had all been good people. Death was never welcome but He always came. It was only to be truly lamented when He took the young, those neither prepared nor deserving of it. Then Death was cruel. Manolis watched the foam rise in the briki and he turned off the flame.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap

“What’s domesticity? Breakfast in bed? The cuckold going to shoot his wife? Does one inevitably lead to the other? I’m asking because there are no rules anymore and I don’t want to end up fucked up. I don’t want to destroy anyone through my love. But I don’t want to end up chasing intimacy from strangers either.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, The Jesus Man

“I wonder if it is the same for women, whether women always feel this pain when they are fucked? Or is it only in sodomy that pain and pleasure are so linked, so inextricable?”
― Christos Tsiolkas, Barracuda

“I swooned again – I had that moment of falling in love with reading again.”
― Christos Tsiolkas

“do want to write a good story. But I no longer trust the judgements of my age. The critic now assesses the writer’s life as much as her work. The judges award prizes according to a checklist of criteria created by corporations and bureaucrats. And we writers and artists acquiesce, fearful of a word that might be misconstrued or an image that might cause offence. I read many of the books nominated for the globalised book prizes; so many of them priggish and scolding, or contrite and chastened. I feel the same way about those films feted at global festivals and award ceremonies. It’s not even that it is dead art: it’s worse, it’s safe art. Most of them don’t even have the dignity of real decay and desiccation: like the puritan elect, they want to take their piety into the next world. Their books and their films don’t even have the power to raise a good stench. The safe is always antiseptic.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, Seven and a Half

“I want two scars, one on each of my shoulder blades.”
He shrugged in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“Two scars,” I repeated, “for where my wings used to be, where my wings were torn away from me.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, Barracuda

“You are not my father."
So it all meant nothing, all those years of shared jokes, of affection, of defending her, of caring for her children, of assisting her and Hector with money and time. Love and family meant nothing to her? Nothing mattered to her at this moment but her pride. Did she think she was being brave in disobeying him? She, Hector, the whole mad lot of them, they knew nothing of courage. Everything had been given to them, everything had been assumed as rightfully theirs. She even believed her defense of her friend was the matter of honour. One war, one bomb, one misfortune and she would fall apart. He meant noting to her because like all of them she was truly selfish. She had no idea of the world and so she believed her drama to be significant. [........] She had no humility and no generosity. Monsters, they had bred monsters.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap

“As a young man he had not dared risk God’s wrath by questioning His purpose. Now he did not give a damn. Fuck it. There was no Paradise and there was no Hell and if there was a God, He was worse than inscrutable. What did exist was the cold, cruel truth of a young man, dead—from cancer or a car accident or suicide or God knows what—at the obscene age of thirty-two.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap

“But just because no-one sang the story, no-one wrote the book, no-one filmed it, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, The Jesus Man

“Once you lose someone's respect it is the hardest thing to win back”
― Christos Tsiolkas

“Transcendence is realising that people do not deserve pity or love or compassion. People deserve contempt.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, Loaded

“she got into an argument with another actress about Spielberg’s The Color Purple. Jenna said it was shit and the other woman, nodding, said, ‘Yeah, right, the book was better.’ And Paul, laughing, continues, ‘And you said, “Nah, the book was shit as well.”’ Shaking his head in astonishment, earnest now, he says, ‘And I thought, Wow, you Aussies don’t hide behind bullshit. We Americans go on about honesty and our feelings and being straight talkers, but you Aussies really are like that.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, Seven and a Half

“Everything is fair in love and art.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, Merciless Gods

“He was going to take in, possess the whole of the world. Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi? Fuck off. He wanted more.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, Barracuda

“He imagined forgiveness was like flying, that it made you soar. He imagined that it looked like an eagle, a silver bolt in the sky, that it was pure light.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, Barracuda

“She moved in her world in slow motion. The little pills she took kept her safe, her eyes were empty of colour, of light. Every couple of years Joe’s father would take his wife to Greece, make a trek to a valley where the Virgin was said to appear. They would drink the holy water, cross themselves, and still the woman would search through her bag to get to the little pills that kept her sane. Sanity is a chemical reaction.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, Loaded

“E quem é que os americanos não destruíram? Olha o que eles estão a fazer no Médio Oriente. É a mesma coisa.
…Mas os Vietnamitas derrotaram-nos, porque eram um povo unido. Ao contrário dos idiotas dos Árabes… os Ingleses puseram-nos uns contra os outros há cem anos e eles são demasiado ignorantes para o perceberem. Se fossem unidos, podiam conquistar o mundo.
…A América não vai deixar ninguém conquistar o mundo, a não ser eles próprios. Rebentam com todos nós antes de deixarem seja quem for levar vantagem.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap

“Discomfort is sometimes what is most precious to me about great art.”
― Christos Tsiolkas

“Contemporary writers annoyed him, he found their worlds insular, their style too self-conscious and ironic. Theirs was not a literature that belonged to him.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, Barracuda

“Queria passar mais uns minutos no mundo que não fosse dominado pela hierarquia e o snobismo e a vingança.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap

“Perry has become mere audience. He had to restrain himself from rolling his eyes moments before, when Evelyn had blithely claimed, 'Australia is such a racist shithole.' He cannot abide this tendency of middle-class Australians to endlessly deride their own country. He finds it jejune, ignorant of the world. But Christ, he scolds himself, that's the habit of the bourgeoisie the world over - he is being unfair.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, The In-Between