Patrick deWitt Quotes
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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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I understand the desire to write and read about the death of publishing. It's a perversely and universally appealing topic.
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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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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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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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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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Unfunny people should be locked up, the key tossed into a smelter.
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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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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.
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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'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 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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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'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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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'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 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.
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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 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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The idea is this: It's important to upset one's work habits, to topple the cart for each project.
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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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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 kept trying to write these books that were sort of outside of my realm, and I kept failing.