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.
Quotes to Explore
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For most of my time in Tallahassee, I did a lot of transportation.
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The economics of baseball are the big problem. The big clubs make a lot of money and the little clubs don't.
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There are really two kinds of optimism. There's the complacent, Pollyanna optimism that says, 'Don't worry - everything will be just fine,' and that allows one to just lay back and do nothing about the problems around you. Then there's what we call dynamic optimism. That's an optimism based on action.
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The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.
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Any time you get two people in a room who disagree about anything, the time of day, there is a scene to be written. That's what I look for.
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I have never found out that there was in my family an artist or anyone interested in the arts or sciences, and I have never been sufficiently interested in my 'family tree' to bother. My father and mother had come to America on one of those great waves of immigration that followed persecution and pogroms in Czarist Russia and Poland.
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Books are not like albums, where you can simply download and enjoy your favorite chapter and ignore the rest.
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I sing to Jesus for Jesus now. This gives me pure joy... worship!
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Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.
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What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.
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I'm the little dog who goes the wrong way - under the hoop.
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This is the beauty of fiction. We may not like these characters, but we inhabit them.
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I was a very physical child... I was a tree-climber; I was a tomboy.
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To oppose something is to maintain it.
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I've always been extremely physically active.
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The older you get, the more comfortable you become with yourself, and you accept what you have physically.
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The important thing is not what they think of me, but what I think of them.
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I love reading religious authors. Especially in the sort of circle I move in, people tend to be more secular, and I love reading books by just really smart people of religious faith. It's always a really cool perspective.
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The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more.
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No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.
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Even though I was theatrically trained, learning to develop a character was an awesome experience.
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The thing I don't like about detective stories is looking for criminals.
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I'm a human being. I'm not dumping on what I've done. I mean I know we were doing social (stuff), all right? I just don't like boastin' about it, OK? I know what we were doin'. I know damn well what we did. But I ain't gonna start crying about it now, all right?
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I'm not an enormous proponent of plot as a reader. It's about other things; my reading has become specialized over the years.
