Patrick deWitt Quotes
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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.
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A lot of authors, judging by their list, will put anything out that they finish... That's the worst model I've heard of in my life. It's just idiotic. Why wouldn't you just wait for the good ones?
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Bernie Madoff is probably more nuanced then I'm giving him credit for, but I just couldn't get under his skin.
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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.
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I know a lot of people who use the Internet really wisely. It enriches their lives in some way.
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I'm either enjoying myself or I'm not. And if I'm not enjoying myself, something's gone terribly wrong.
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I've stopped reading about the death of books because it's wasteful and morbid and insulting to the authors, agents, publishers, booksellers, critics, and readers that keep the world community of fiction interesting.
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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.
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The theme of luck comes up a lot. It's something I thought about before, why some people are lucky and some people aren't lucky. It seems like some people you meet can sort of cultivate luck, and I've always been fascinated by that.
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Lies can be wonderful things, and when a lie is told artfully, if it's done with a degree of craftsmanship, I can't help but admire the liar.
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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.
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One of the nice things about writing is you can take essentially painful things in your life and turn them into something that might be useful, or at least entertaining, to somebody else.
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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.
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I wouldn't want to write a biography of anyone. I'd feel too inhibited by the facts and too much pressure to do the subject's life justice.
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'The Sisters Brothers' started out as a little bit of dialogue between these two men who became Eli and Charlie Sisters.
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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.
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Looking around, I saw so many unhappy adults, people who loathed their jobs, and I didn't want to be one of them.
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I am increasingly unimpressed by works of art that require a college degree to understand. I think that art should be for everyone. And people should be moved by it.
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If you're not riddled with doubt, you've probably done something wrong.
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Working in a bar was a horrific idea for me.
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I've fallen in love in my life a few times. It's the most exciting part of being alive - that I've experienced, anyway.
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I kept trying to write these books that were sort of outside of my realm, and I kept failing.
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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.
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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.