Tim Winton Quotes

There is nowhere else I'd rather be, nothing else I would prefer to be doing. I am at the beach looking west with the continent behind me as the sun tracks down to the sea. I have my bearings.

It's the pointless things that give your life meaning. Friendship, compassion, art, love. All of them pointless. But they're what keeps life from being meaningless.

The ocean is a supreme metaphor for change. I expect the unexpected but am never fully prepared.

When you're surfing you're not thinking about where you parked the car or what you're going to do when you grow up or what you're going to buy when you've got lots of money. You know, you're just there. You're in the moment. And I think in a contemporary world, that's a rare privilege.

For every moment the sea is peace and relief, there is another when it shivers and stirs to become chaos. It's just as ready to claim as it is to offer.

The health of our seas determines the future of humanity.

I love the sea but it does not love me. The sea is like a desert in that it is quite rightly feared. The sea and the desert are both hungry, they have things to be getting on with so you do not go into them lightly.

Humour's the pay-off for all that existential horror.

I don't believe there's anything cosmic or divine or morally superior about whales and dolphins or sharks or trees, but I do think that everything that lives is holy and somehow integrated; and on cloudy days I suspect that these extraordinary phenomena, and the hundreds of tiny, modest versions no one hears about, are an ocean, an earth, a Creator, something shaking us by the collar, demanding our attention, our fear, our vigilance, our respect, our help.

Surfing is sensual. It's a real-time engagement with the forces of nature, which happen to be echoes of the past (which after all, is all a wave really is). Briefly we defy gravity and ride the energy of storms from elsewhere. We are intensely alone as we do it and yet completely swallowed by something larger that enforces a sense of perspective and connectedness to the natural world. It's an experience we yearn to repeat so we go searching for it again and again and we spend years sitting in the water waiting for these radiating lines to come in across the event horizon.

I went to school for 12 years, and uni for four, but I learnt more about human existence in the 30 hours it took my first child to be born than I did in all those years of study.

The end of the world begins in the sea we love.

We rise to a challenge and set a course. We take a decision. You put your mind to something. Just deciding to do it gets you halfway there. Daring to try.

In fiction 'issues' are accidental, sometimes incidental. The place and the people it creates are paramount.

Ah, but you, Darkness, you know all this. I tell you night after night. Nothing will shock you. Maybe I go on at you in the hope that there's something beyond you. Some nights I sit here and talk and sob and stare out into the blackness thinking that if I look hard enough I'll see the light behind. But I stay out until the break of day, waiting, hoping, and there's only sunrise again.

Whatever you believe, you need faith to get through the day.

It's impossible to imagine what Australia would be like without surfing.

It's terrifying to think you can remember things you shouldn't possibly be able to. It's like that childhood fear of having your soul slip from your body in your sleep. The darkness, those black sheets of glass sliding over you, upping the pressure, pushing you through the time and space and story.

For a while Australians were desperately trying to be cosmopolitan. I think it is a pointless exercise. Australian novels are those rooted in Australia, with Australian landscapes and colours. My work has always had bits of Western Australia in it. It is always here. The world comes to us.

If we love the sea as much as we claim to we'll do everything we possibly can to keep it healthy. Otherwise we might as well take up golf.

It's dark already and I'm out here again, talking, telling the story to the quiet night.

It is always amusing to me and delightful of course that my books sell so well in America and other parts of the world. I can't imagine what people must think as they read my books in Poland. Or in Hebrew and Greek. People are reading all the stories which are about bits of Western Australia.

I just sit here and tell the story as though I can't help it. There's always something in the day that reminds me, that sets me off all hot and guilty and scared and rambling and wistful, like I am now.

Surviving is the strongest memory I have; the sense of having walked on water.

People do change - individuals, families, nations - and the pace of transformation need not be geological.