Top 60 Tim Winton Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Tim Winton

2. “It’s funny, but you never really think much about breathing. Until it’s all you ever think about.”

— Tim Winton

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

— Tim Winton

4. “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.”

— Tim Winton

5. “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.”

— Tim Winton

6. “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.”

— Tim Winton

7. “It’s how I fill the time when nothing’s happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.”

— Tim Winton

8. “I came home at dusk with my ears ringing from the quiet.”

— Tim Winton

9. “The desert is a spiritual place, we vaguely understand, and the sea the mere playground of our hedonism.”

— Tim Winton

10. “I liked books – the respite and privacy of them – books about plants and the formation of ice and the business of world wars. Whenever I sank into them I felt free.”

— Tim Winton

11. “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.”

— Tim Winton

12. “There are no wastelands in our landscape quite like those we’ve created ourselves.”

— Tim Winton

13. “Shanksing across that country you stick out like a rat on a birthday cake.”

— Tim Winton

14. “Time doesn’t click on and on at the stroke. It comes and goes in waves and folds like water; it flutters and sifts like dust, rises, billows, falls back on itself. When a wave breaks, the water is not moving. The swell has traveled great distances but only the energy is moving, not the waves. Perhaps time moves through us and not through it.”

— Tim Winton

15. “Liam Rector’s “Song Years”: “Change is hard and hope is violent”.”

— Tim Winton

16. “Hunting and gathering are in my blood. But I’ve lived long enough to witness a diminution in the seas, and to notice a fragility where once I saw – or assumed – an endless bounty.”

— Tim Winton

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

— Tim Winton

18. “People are fools, not monsters.”

— Tim Winton

19. “She wondered if you could love someone too much. If you could it wasn’t fair. People didn’t have a chance. Love was all you had in the end. It was like sleep, like clean water. When you fell off the world there was still love because love made the world. That’s what she believed. That’s how it was.”

— Tim Winton

20. “Rare as rocking-horse turds, these days, feeling halfway to decent, with barely a sick twinge, and he was damned if he’d waste.”

— Tim Winton

21. “Life was something you didn’t argue with, because when it came down to it, whether you barracked for God or nothing at all, life was all there was. And death.”

— Tim Winton

22. “I go out to the cliffs with binoculars to see whales find their way in from the southern mist and I walk here in this paddock, stubbornly, wondering at the heat each of us leaves in our wake.”

— Tim Winton

23. “There’s a sad feeling in a place people have just walked out of and left behind.”

— Tim Winton

24. “It’s impossible to imagine what Australia would be like without surfing.”

— Tim Winton

25. “Being afreaid proves you’re alive and awake.”

— Tim Winton

26. “She was like a sheet anchor sometimes, a steadying influence on him, on everyone around her. Made people laugh, that sensible streak in her, but it also made her someone of substance.”

— Tim Winton

27. “The beachcomber goes looking for trouble, everything he finds is a sign of trouble. The writer is the same; without trouble he has nothing to work with, so he picks over the tide line, over the bits and pieces of people’s lives with grim fascination.”

— Tim Winton

28. “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.”

— Tim Winton

29. “On our hunger to control and know everything humans break and spoil.”

— Tim Winton

30. “People do change – individuals, families, nations – and the pace of transformation need not be geological.”

— Tim Winton

31. “It’s sadness coming on like the old days, the vast seamless hopeless weight of sadness looking for a place to rest.”

— Tim Winton

32. “And I wish I could say I stayed up late thinking about him but the truth is I was only awake a little while. I was so tired the swag felt like a sponge that soaked me up. I went to sleep like someone disappearing from the earth, like rain sopped into dust.”

— Tim Winton

33. “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.”

— Tim Winton

34. “And the sun on the wall of her room, the block of sun with all the tiny flying things in it. When she was little she thought they were the souls of dead insects, still buzzing in the light.”

— Tim Winton

35. “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.”

— Tim Winton

36. “And you can’t help but worry for them, love them, want for them – those who go on down the close, foetid galleries of time and space without you.”

— Tim Winton

37. “It’s dark already and I’m out here again, talking, telling the story to the quiet night.”

— Tim Winton

38. “Somewhere a bicycle bell rings. Somewhere else there’s a war on. Somewhere else people turn to shadows and powder in an instant and the streets turn to funnels and light the sky with their burning. Somewhere a war is over.”

— Tim Winton

39. “During those years of travel I saw that architecture is what we console ourselves with once we’ve obliterated our natural landscapes.”

— Tim Winton

40. “When I was a girl I had this strong feeling that I didn’t belong anywhere,... It was in my head, what I thought and dreamt, what I believed... , that’s where I belonged, that was my country.”

— Tim Winton

41. “Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. Yachts run before an unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water’s edge.”

— Tim Winton

42. “But I spose the women and the children was the closest. There’s something about the men just stops them being able.”

— Tim Winton

43. “There’s things that have no finish, Scully, no ending to speak of. There’s no justice to it, but that’s the God’s truth. The only end some things have is the end you give em.”

— Tim Winton

44. “Inside those waves our voices bounced back at us, deeper and larger for all the noise, like the voices of men.”

— Tim Winton

45. “And though I’ve lived to be an old man with my very own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.”

— Tim Winton

46. “I invested them with a bogus nobility. To a suburban kid they seemed so special, enduring, wild and stiff-necked, in amongst the ancient rocks and gnarled trees, and while it was true enough they carried their secret places in their bodies and in their language, many simply wore their ordinary, dreary undigested pasts like rain-sodden greatcoats and lived like cripples.”

— Tim Winton

47. “Wherever I went I felt like the last person awake in a room full of sleepers.”

— Tim Winton

48. “The night is full of stories. They float up like miasmas, as though the dead leave their dreams in the earth where you bury them, only to have them rise to meet you in sleep. Mostly the scenes are familiar, but sometimes everything is strange, the people unknown.”

— Tim Winton

49. “They probably don’t understand this, but it’s important for me to show them that their father is a man who dances – who saves lives and carries the wounded, yes, but who also does something completely pointless and beautiful, and in this at least he should need no explanation.”

— Tim Winton

50. “I was in my thirties before I learnt that I too would prefer not to see what I could no longer have.”

— Tim Winton