Patrick deWitt Quotes
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I don't consider Los Angeles home anymore; ultimately, it was pretty negative, but I did spend my formative years in the Valley and all around L.A. proper. Through my teenage years and into my young adulthood, up until the age of 30, I spent a good amount of time there.
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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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'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 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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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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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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I know a lot of people who use the Internet really wisely. It enriches their lives in some way.
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Unfunny people should be locked up, the key tossed into a smelter.
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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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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'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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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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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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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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I don't know that happy people are interesting to write about - or to read about.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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I haven't read a lot of Westerns. But I wrote a Western. The influences were all cinematic.
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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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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 don't know that I'd call myself an optimist.
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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.