Patrick DeWitt Quotes

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

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.

He is not bad, I don't think. Perhaps he is simply too lazy to be good.

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.

It is a glory and a torment.

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

Despite Tub's eye wound he never so much as stumbled, and I felt for the first time that we knew and understood each other; I sensed in him a desire to improve himself, which perhaps was whimsy or wishful thinking on my part, but such are the musings of the traveling man. The

Certain writers look down their noses at plot, and I think I might have been one of them until I tried it.

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

It would seem to me that the solitude of working in the wilds is not healthy for a man.

I am happy to welcome you to a town peopled in morons exclusively. Furthermore, I hope that your transformation to moron is not an unpleasant experience.

That is to say, nine dead beavers in a line on the sand. There was something decorative about this, but also ominous or forbidding.

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

I was often forced to whip him, which some men do not mind doing and which in fact some enjoy doing, but which I did not like to do; and afterward he, Tub, believes me cruel and thought to himself, Sad life, sad life.

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.

All you will get from me is death.

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

I've got a publicist at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who's been working little miracles for me, but it's true the budgets aren't what they once were in terms of advertisement and book tours.

My interest in words and literature is always changing. And every day of work is different, and it doesn't feel laborious in the way that, say, washing dishes did. I'm quite happy to be doing what I'm doing, and I feel very lucky.

Easier asked than answered," said Mr. Olderglough. "For our days here are varied, and so our needs are also varied. On the whole, I think you'll find the workload to be light in that you will surely have ample free time. But then there comes the question of what one does with his free time. I have occasionally felt that this was the most difficult part of the job; indeed, the most difficult part of being alive, wouldn't you say, boy?

Unfunny people should be locked up, the key tossed into a smelter.

I had nowhere to go and did not wish to be seen by anyone for fear they would recognize my sadness and so for several minutes I simply stood in the hall shifting my weight and breathing and attempting to clear my mind of every recognizable thought.

I'm done talking about your horse, Eli.' 'If you think it will not come up again, you are mistaken.

She knew she was living improperly but hadn't the strength to correct herself. She had twenty thousand euros left; she'd taken to flushing hundreds down the toilet each morning.

I find the constant upkeep of the body woefully fatiguing, don't you?

Looking into each other's eyes and speaking together in low tones, it becomes apparent that she hopes you will walk her through her troubles and show her that male-female relations can be lovely even in loveless union. She is looking for lust fulfilled but she searches also for respect, and in this she is out of luck because you do not know her or like her very much and you do not respect yourself and so the most you can offer this girl is time out of her life and an unsatisfactory meeting of bodies and, if the fates are generous, a couple of laughs and good feelings. At any rate there will unquestionably be a divot in your hearts before dawn and Peg seems to pick up on this after thirty minutes of groping and pawing (the car interior is damp with dew) she breaks away and with great exasperation says, "What do you think you're doing?" You are smiling, because it is an utterly stupid and boring question, and you say to her, "I am sitting in an American car, trying to make out in America," a piece of poetry that arouses something in her, and you both climb into the back seat for a meeting even less satisfactory than you feared it might be. Now she is crying and you are shivering and it is time to go home and if you had a watch you would snap your wrist to look meaningfully at it but she dabs at her face and says she wants you to come upstairs and share a special-occasion bottle of very old and expensive wine and as there is no way not to do this you follow her through the dusty

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.

I had never been with a woman for longer than a night, and they had always been whores. And while throughout each of these speedy encounters I tried to maintain a friendliness with the women, I knew in my heart it was false, and afterward always felt remote and caved in. I had in the last year or so given up whores entirely, thinking it best to go without rather than pantomime human closeness.

When you sleep, your dreams are those of a dullard

I will try to be happy, you think, and your heart and chest feel a plummeting, as in the case of the hurtling rollercoaster, and your heart wants to cry and sob, but you, not wanting to cry, hit yourself hard in the center of your chest and it hurts so much but you drive on, your face dry and remaining dry, though it had been a close call, after all.

You return to your car and find a note on the windshield: 'where did you go?' the note is not signed and the love in your heart is gone. It feels as if it was never there at all.

It's healthy to have interests besides books.

Whenever we changed schools, we had to make a new set of friends. At the time, of course, I hated it. But looking back now, I'm really glad I did, because it forces independence on you.

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

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

In the late afternoon the group assembled for cocktails. Without consorting about it they'd all dressed up, and the women's perfumes fought for supremacy in the living room. The sun set, candles were lit; Mme Reynard found an English dictionary among the cookbooks and proposed they play the game called Dictionary, whereby a player assigns an incorrect definition to an unknown word in hopes of fooling the other players.
She claimed the secateur was the sabateur's assistant. Malcom that costalgia was a shared reminiscence, Susan that a remotion was a lateral promotion, Frances that polonaise was an outmoded British condiment fabricated from a horse's bone marrow, Madeline that a puncheon was a contentious luncheon, and Joan that a syrt was a Syrian breath mint. Julius, whose English was not fully matured, said that unbearing was the act of "removing a bear from a peopled premises.

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

He makes good time for a hysterical man on foot.

I felt a premonitory concern they would never revisit it.

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

The nice thing about writing at home is that it's almost as though I'm doing it already. I get out of bed thinking of my work, and I don't have to go anywhere to do it.

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.

It is hard to find a friend,' I said. 'It is the hardest thing in this world,' he agreed.

Crossing the square at Saint-Sulpice, he split through a stream of nuns, who, as insects interrupted, lost the scent of their paths and spun away in eddies.

I thought, Perhaps a man is never meant to be truly happy. Perhaps there is no such a thing in our world, after all. As

I could leave here and return to my hometown, but I would not return as the person I was when I left,' he explained. 'I would not recognize anyone. And no one would recognize me.

Susan paused a pause which, the moment Malcolm heard it, he knew something ugly was on the other end of it. He waited for the ugliness, and here it was: "He's asked me to marry him," Susan said.

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.

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.

Mayfield said, You asked what I was thinking. Well, I will tell you. I was thinking that a man like myself, after suffering such a blow as you men have struck on this day, has two distinct paths he might travel in his life. He might walk out into the world with a wounded heart, intent on sharing his mad hatred with every person he passes; or, he might start out anew with an empty heart, and he should take care to fill it up with only proud things from then on, so as to nourish his desolate mind-set and cultivate something positive or new.

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.

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.

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

Do you know how much a hundred dollars is?' he asked. I said that I did not and he answered, 'It is a hundred dollars.

I've been surprised at how much an unknown like myself can accomplish just by reaching out to people and pleading my case. Quotes for the book cover, reviews and interviews, readings and radio appearances - all this by simply moving ahead and making contact with folks I thought might enjoy the writing.

Here lies Morris, a good man and friend. He enjoyed the finer points of civilized life but never shied away from a hearty adventure or hard work. He died a free man, which is more than most people can say, if we are going to be honest about it. Most people are chained to their own fear and stupidity and haven't the sense to level a cold eye at just what is wrong with their lives. Most people will continue on, dissatisfied but never attempting to understand why, or how they might change things for the better, and they die with nothing in their hearts but dirt and old, thin blood - weak blood, diluted - and their memories aren't worth a goddamned thing, you will see what I mean.

He blinks and says that there are two types of people: Those who want to cry, and those who are crying already and want to stop.

There is nothing typical about my profession.' Suddenly I did not want to talk about it any longer. 'I don't want to talk about it any longer.

But I could not sleep without proper covering and spent the rest of the night rewriting lost arguments from my past, altering history so that I emerged victorious.

Your laughter is like cool water to me," I said. I felt my heart sob at these strange words, and it would not have been hard to summon tears: Strange. " "You are so serious all of a sudden," she told me. "I am not any one thing," I said. (137)

I wrote for so many years in a bubble, the way everyone does, and there were large swaths of time where you think you're doing this for nothing. An audience is crucial, a back and forth with the invisible readers.

Let us look within ourselves and search out the dormant warrior." "Mine is dormant to the point of non-existence, sir.

Our blood is the same, we just use it differently.

I will never be a leader of men, and neither do I want to be one, and neither do I want to be led. I thought: I want to lead only myself.

I look upon my past with disgrace. I was herded and instructed. But I will be herded and instructed no more. Today I am born anew, and my life will become my own again. It will be different ever after.

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.

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

The effects of her words stung me, and after she stole away I stood a long while before her looking glass, studying my profile, the line I cut in this world of men and ladies.

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

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

This moment, this one position in time, was the happiest I will ever be as long as I am living. I have since felt it was too happy, that men are not meant to have access to this kind of satisfaction; certainly it has tempered every moment of happiness I have experienced since.

I carry a small spiral notebook with me at all times and have been doing this for many years. There's a shoe box in my closet filled with these notebooks, each riddled with notes and impressions, ideas, schemes, and soup recipes.

She wasn't precisely sure what she was walking toward but she wouldn't have turned around for the world.

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.

What of the melancholy, may I ask?"
"Stubbornly persistent, I'm sorry to say."
"If only modest joy were so dogged, eh?"
"You said something there, sir.

I hope he dies out there," you say, and you laugh-sputter at the statement because it is a terrible thing to have said aloud and you hope you can play it off as a joke but Simon is staring hard at you, and now he knows for a fact something he has suspected for years, which is that you have a streak of hate in your heart and that it is deep and wide and though you have hidden it, it is unmistakably uncovered now, and he will never feel that previously mentioned fondness for you again [...]

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.

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

Every industry has slack times, and everyone has bad days at work.

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

when I see you, I feel the same. It is when I am away that I lose myself.

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.

Some wear greed as a fine suit of clothes. But you, my son, bear its stamp ever more poorly.

I sighed. 'It doesn't matter what we do. Money comes and goes.' I shook my head. 'It doesn't matter and you know it doesn't.

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.

Feeling my middle section, which is and always has been bountiful, I said I did not think I would fit in the small

The story of Reginald Watts was a luckless one dealing in every manner of failure and catastrophe, though he spoke of this without bitterness or regret, and in fact seemed to find humor in his numberless missteps: 'I've failed at straight business, I've failed at criminal enterprise, I've failed at love, I've failed at friendship. You name it, I've failed at it. Go ahead and name something. Anything at all.

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.

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

He wandered here and there over rolling hills.
He never saw the ocean but
dreamed of it often enough.

Just your everyday grouping of civilized gentlemen, sitting in a round robin to discuss the events of the day with quivering erections.

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.

It is true, I thought. I am living a life.

Your skin is prickly from fatigue and pain and there is a hissing in your ears. Time passes and the pills are taking hold like a glowing white planet coming into view. A reverse eclipse. And you watch with your eyes closed. The white planet is half exposed, it grips your heart in its light and seems to be pulling you forward and now you feel that you are falling. You are awake but dreaming. "The earth is not beautiful but the universe is," you say.

I don't suppose I have a choice.'
'As with so many things in a life, brother, I don't suppose you do.

You put a wage behind something, it gives the act a sort of respectability.

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.

All I know, boy, is that life is, on occasion, entirely too vast for my tastes.

His heart was a church of his own choosing,
and the lights came through
the colourful windows.