Top 45 Patrick deWitt Quotes

I’m not an enormous proponent of plot as a reader. It’s about other things; my reading has become specialized over the years.

‘The Sisters Brothers‘ started out as a little bit of dialogue between these two men who became Eli and Charlie Sisters.

I know a lot of people who use the Internet really wisely. It enriches their lives in some way.

The impetus for ‘The Sisters Brothers’ was it occurred to me that there was no neurosis in westerns, or there’s a minimal amount of it.

I am a homebody, something that lends itself to my profession.

Looking around, I saw so many unhappy adults, people who loathed their jobs, and I didn’t want to be one of them.

I don’t know that happy people are interesting to write about – or to read about.

The hardest thing in the world for a writer is to amass a readership. So many good books come out, and so many good books disappear.

My first book didn’t even have a Canadian publisher. And that upset me, because I so wanted a readership up there.

The idea is this: It’s important to upset one’s work habits, to topple the cart for each project.

I don’t know that I’d call myself an optimist.

I had no plan to write a western novel, and when I realized it was happening, I was pretty surprised by it. But you have to go with what feels right.

Some deeper part of me wants to write comical dialogue; I’d be foolish to not follow that impulse. Now I recognize that if there’s energy to a section of work, you go where the energy is. It’s a living thing, and you just follow it.

Especially if you’re endeavouring daily to write your own books, you read with a degree of – well, it’s hard to forget you’re a writer when you’re reading.

By the time I left the bar, I was 30. I was a dishwasher. They call it a bar-back, but essentially, I washed dishes for a living. I had no high-school diploma, I had no agent, and my literary successes were non-existent… but it was the only thing I ever wanted to do, so I did feel trapped.

I haven‘t read hardly any Westerns, to tell you the truth.

I heard somewhere that whenever you write a book, people will ask you One Question about it over and over. And while I’m no expert in these matters, this is proving to be true. My first book dealt with a not-that-pleasant degenerate type, and the One Question was, ‘Is this an autobiographical story?’

I don’t necessarily want to make people stomp and clap. I simply want to engage people.

I kept trying to write these books that were sort of outside of my realm, and I kept failing.

I come by writing dialogue fairly naturally, I’ve got a chatty family; I’m a bit of a voyeur, and if I’m ever in a public place, I automatically find myself listening.

Humorous writing is often thought of as substandard in comparison to work with a more dramatic or tragic intent. I don’t know what to say to this except that I disagree wholeheartedly.

If you’re not riddled with doubt, you’ve probably done something wrong.

The reason I like Portland is the idea of going to a supermarket and knowing there’s no way to be recognized. L.A. is so social.

When you’re 8 years old, and you’ve become subconsciously familiar with the layout and design of Black Sparrow books, and you know the difference between Miles Davis and John Coltrane, something is bound to stick.

Love is dangerous; it’s not something to be trifled with. As good as it feels on the way in, it feels that much worse on the way out.

When you meet someone you love, whether or not they love you back, something occurs in you that makes you want to improve yourself.

I have a paranoia that ‘Ablutions’ is the best thing I’ll ever do.

I was reading my son some fables; it made for good nighttime reading. These stories were very vivid and very strange and occasionally bizarrely violent. It was a very free landscape.

The initial spark, your affection for the characters, all those things can disappear. It’s a perilous thing.

I’m either enjoying myself or I’m not. And if I’m not enjoying myself, something’s gone terribly wrong.

I was intentionally curbing the impulse to be funny and hiding the ability. I wrote any number of very serious attempts at poems, short stories, novels – horrible. At a certain point, I recognized that it was fun to write dialogue that had a degree of lightness and humor.

I haven’t read a lot of Westerns. But I wrote a Western. The influences were all cinematic.

I’m never doing anything by rote. I’m only on thin ice, and I think that that’s a good place to be. I feel like when you push yourself like that, the rewards can be pretty great.

After ‘The Sisters Brothers,’ I tried to write a contemporary story dealing with an investment adviser in New York City who moves to Paris. I did all this research, but after about a year and any number of pages written, I was bored stiff.

My instinct is to write under the cloak of an opaque historical setting.

At the age of seventeen, I decided I would spend my life writing fiction. I didn’t know what this entailed, exactly – a room, I supposed. A room and books and paper and solitude.

All the books I was reading as a teenager were about individuals having adventures. So I thought that was what writers were supposed to do: to go out on the road.

I felt like love has been underrepresented – unironic love, just actually really falling in love.

‘The Sisters Brothers’ has endeared so many prize juries because the Western format has more of a broad appeal and is familiar to readers.

Many’s the dead author whose body of work has been marred by overzealous publishers or family members. If this happens to me, I vow to seek out the responsible parties and haunt them to the point of death.

I think of myself as somebody who, in a moment-to-moment way, I’m quite happy. But I think I am a bit doubtful and wary of true happiness, and, like a lot of my friends, there’s been a good degree of self-sabotage.

When your protagonist bores you, you’re in trouble.

Bernie Madoff is probably more nuanced then I’m giving him credit for, but I just couldn’t get under his skin.

A lot of my favourite books – I should say, not much happens in the books! It’s much more about the points of view of the author more than anything else.

More and more, I find myself turning away from everything relating to contemporary society. I don’t know how healthy it is, but I am creating a very private bubble that I live in.