Top 100 Patrick DeWitt Quotes
#1. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#2. I don't necessarily want to make people stomp and clap. I simply want to engage people.
Patrick DeWitt
#3. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#4. I felt like love has been underrepresented - unironic love, just actually really falling in love.
Patrick DeWitt
#5. Let us look within ourselves and search out the dormant warrior." "Mine is dormant to the point of non-existence, sir.
Patrick DeWitt
#6. I understand the desire to write and read about the death of publishing. It's a perversely and universally appealing topic.
Patrick DeWitt
#7. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#8. Bernie Madoff is probably more nuanced then I'm giving him credit for, but I just couldn't get under his skin.
Patrick DeWitt
#9. The initial spark, your affection for the characters, all those things can disappear. It's a perilous thing.
Patrick DeWitt
#10. I kept trying to write these books that were sort of outside of my realm, and I kept failing.
Patrick DeWitt
#11. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#13. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#14. Some wear greed as a fine suit of clothes. But you, my son, bear its stamp ever more poorly.
Patrick DeWitt
#15. I saw my bulky person in the windows of the passing storefronts and wondered, when will that man there find himself to be loved?
Patrick DeWitt
#16. Returning his pen to its holder, he told us, 'I will have him gutted with that scythe. I will hang him by his own intestines.' At this piece of dramatic exposition, I could not hep but roll my eyes. A length of intestines would not carry the weight of a child, much less a full grown man.
Patrick DeWitt
#17. 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?
Patrick DeWitt
#18. Often the starting point for characters, for me, is finding a little, most minor detail, and I'll go from there.
Patrick DeWitt
#19. The question about my Canadianness comes up a lot, and I'm never quite sure what to say about it. I've carved a life out for myself in Oregon, and it feels like home, not because it's the States but because that's where my friends are and where my son is.
Patrick DeWitt
#20. He is not bad, I don't think. Perhaps he is simply too lazy to be good.
Patrick DeWitt
#21. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#22. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#23. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#24. Certain writers look down their noses at plot, and I think I might have been one of them until I tried it.
Patrick DeWitt
#25. I felt a premonitory concern they would never revisit it.
Patrick DeWitt
#26. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#27. The hardest thing in the world for a writer is to amass a readership. So many good books come out, and so many good books disappear.
Patrick DeWitt
#28. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#29. When your protagonist bores you, you're in trouble.
Patrick DeWitt
#30. Where is your mother, Charlie asked. Dead. I'm sorry to hear that Thank you. But she was always dead.
Patrick DeWitt
#31. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#32. You will know it, Charlie, if my burden becomes unbearable. You will know it and so will he.
Patrick DeWitt
#34. I think of myself as somebody who, in a moment-to-moment way, I'm quite happy. But I think I am a bit doubtful and wary of true happiness, and, like a lot of my friends, there's been a good degree of self-sabotage.
Patrick DeWitt
#35. I find the constant upkeep of the body woefully fatiguing, don't you?
Patrick DeWitt
#36. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#37. I know a lot of people who use the Internet really wisely. It enriches their lives in some way.
Patrick DeWitt
#39. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#40. Every industry has slack times, and everyone has bad days at work.
Patrick DeWitt
#41. After school, I got a job in a shop in Hollywood and shared an apartment with a friend. I promptly lost my job and got evicted from my apartment, and that happened several times.
Patrick DeWitt
#42. 'The Sisters Brothers' started out as a little bit of dialogue between these two men who became Eli and Charlie Sisters.
Patrick DeWitt
#43. I'm not an enormous proponent of plot as a reader. It's about other things; my reading has become specialized over the years.
Patrick DeWitt
#45. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#46. He only wished to fight and cultivate an anger toward me, thus alleviating his guilt, but I would not abet him in this.
Patrick DeWitt
#47. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#49. There is a feeling here, which if it gets you, will envenom your very center. It is a madness of possibilities.
Patrick DeWitt
#50. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#51. 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)
Patrick DeWitt
#52. It is hard to find a friend,' I said. 'It is the hardest thing in this world,' he agreed.
Patrick DeWitt
#53. I will admit he is unusual, but that is perhaps the closest I could come to complimenting him.
Patrick DeWitt
#54. Looking around, I saw so many unhappy adults, people who loathed their jobs, and I didn't want to be one of them.
Patrick DeWitt
#55. If you're not riddled with doubt, you've probably done something wrong.
Patrick DeWitt
#56. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#57. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#58. When you sleep, your dreams are those of a dullard
Patrick DeWitt
#59. I'm done talking about your horse, Eli.' 'If you think it will not come up again, you are mistaken.
Patrick DeWitt
#60. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#61. Feeling my middle section, which is and always has been bountiful, I said I did not think I would fit in the small
Patrick DeWitt
#62. All I know, boy, is that life is, on occasion, entirely too vast for my tastes.
Patrick DeWitt
#63. At the age of seventeen, I decided I would spend my life writing fiction. I didn't know what this entailed, exactly - a room, I supposed. A room and books and paper and solitude.
Patrick DeWitt
#64. My instinct is to write under the cloak of an opaque historical setting.
Patrick DeWitt
#65. We can all of us be hurt, and no one is exclusively safe from worry and sadness.
Patrick DeWitt
#66. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#67. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#68. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#69. I've always felt so fortunate to have writing to turn to every day. I'm obsessed with it.
Patrick DeWitt
#71. I am a bit prudish, I think. It's hard for me to write about sex, and I don't really care to read about it, either.
Patrick DeWitt
#73. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#75. I was halfway through a rough draft of 'The Sisters Brothers' when it came time to start the 'Terri' adaptation.
Patrick DeWitt
#76. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#77. And yet he held his tongue, wanting his farewell with Marina to be peaceable, not out of any magnanimity, but so that after Tor ruined her - he felt confident Tor would ruin her - and she was once more alone, she would think of Lucy's graciousness and feel the long-lingering sting of bitter regret.
Patrick DeWitt
#79. This marked the end of our toothbrush conversation.
Patrick DeWitt
#80. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#81. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#82. Many's the dead author whose body of work has been marred by overzealous publishers or family members. If this happens to me, I vow to seek out the responsible parties and haunt them to the point of death.
Patrick DeWitt
#83. Come with me into the world and reclaim your independence. You stand to gain so much, and riches are the least of it.
Patrick DeWitt
#84. That is to say, nine dead beavers in a line on the sand. There was something decorative about this, but also ominous or forbidding.
Patrick DeWitt
#85. In actuality they were neither of them old men; their arms were still wiry with muscle, their backs straight and strong, and yet they had surpassed the mean, the centremark of their lives, and were both aware of an overall dimming. "Every
Patrick DeWitt
#86. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#87. My flesh and scalp started to ring and tingle and I became someone other than myself, or I became my second self, and this person was highly pleased to be stepping from the murk and into the living world where he might do just as he wished.
Patrick DeWitt
#88. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#89. Our blood is the same, we just use it differently.
Patrick DeWitt
#90. In the end I decided to hold onto the book, my thought being that his story was a unique one, and so best to keep his words aboveground where they might be shared and admired.
Patrick DeWitt
#91. I am a homebody, something that lends itself to my profession.
Patrick DeWitt
#92. I'm either enjoying myself or I'm not. And if I'm not enjoying myself, something's gone terribly wrong.
Patrick DeWitt
#93. when I see you, I feel the same. It is when I am away that I lose myself.
Patrick DeWitt
#94. Things I had come to find humor in would make your honest man swoon.
Patrick DeWitt
#95. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#96. The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know.
Patrick DeWitt
#97. Unfunny people should be locked up, the key tossed into a smelter.
Patrick DeWitt
#98. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#99. All of my close friends are emotional train wrecks. This is what makes our lives interesting - constantly doubting ourselves, worrying, wondering if we've made a mistake. Could we have done better? Are we good people? Are we bad people?
Patrick DeWitt
#100. I cannot understand the motivation of a bully, is what it is; this is the one thing that makes me unreasonable. I
Patrick DeWitt
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