Top 100 Patrick Dewitt Quotes
#1. 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
#2. It is hard to find a friend,' I said. 'It is the hardest thing in this world,' he agreed.
Patrick DeWitt
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. There is a feeling here, which if it gets you, will envenom your very center. It is a madness of possibilities.
Patrick DeWitt
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#11. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#12. 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
#13. 'The Sisters Brothers' started out as a little bit of dialogue between these two men who became Eli and Charlie Sisters.
Patrick DeWitt
#14. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#15. Every industry has slack times, and everyone has bad days at work.
Patrick DeWitt
#16. 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
#18. I know a lot of people who use the Internet really wisely. It enriches their lives in some way.
Patrick DeWitt
#19. 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
#20. I find the constant upkeep of the body woefully fatiguing, don't you?
Patrick DeWitt
#21. 'The Sisters Brothers' has endeared so many prize juries because the Western format has more of a broad appeal and is familiar to readers.
Patrick DeWitt
#22. 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
#23. 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
Patrick DeWitt
#25. You will know it, Charlie, if my burden becomes unbearable. You will know it and so will he.
Patrick DeWitt
#26. I'm done talking about your horse, Eli.' 'If you think it will not come up again, you are mistaken.
Patrick DeWitt
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. We can all of us be hurt, and no one is exclusively safe from worry and sadness.
Patrick DeWitt
#31. My instinct is to write under the cloak of an opaque historical setting.
Patrick DeWitt
#32. Here is another miserable mental image I will have to catalog and make room for.
Patrick DeWitt
#33. The idea is this: It's important to upset one's work habits, to topple the cart for each project.
Patrick DeWitt
#34. 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
#35. All I know, boy, is that life is, on occasion, entirely too vast for my tastes.
Patrick DeWitt
#36. 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
#37. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#38. 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
#39. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#40. You put a wage behind something, it gives the act a sort of respectability.
Patrick DeWitt
#41. When you sleep, your dreams are those of a dullard
Patrick DeWitt
#42. 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
#43. It would seem to me that the solitude of working in the wilds is not healthy for a man.
Patrick DeWitt
#44. 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
#45. If you're not riddled with doubt, you've probably done something wrong.
Patrick DeWitt
#46. 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
#47. I haven't read a lot of Westerns. But I wrote a Western. The influences were all cinematic.
Patrick DeWitt
#48. He wandered here and there over rolling hills.
He never saw the ocean but
dreamed of it often enough.
Patrick DeWitt
#50. I will admit he is unusual, but that is perhaps the closest I could come to complimenting him.
Patrick DeWitt
#51. I understand the desire to write and read about the death of publishing. It's a perversely and universally appealing topic.
Patrick DeWitt
#52. Just your everyday grouping of civilized gentlemen, sitting in a round robin to discuss the events of the day with quivering erections.
Patrick DeWitt
#53. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#55. 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
#56. I kept trying to write these books that were sort of outside of my realm, and I kept failing.
Patrick DeWitt
#57. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#58. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#59. I don't know that happy people are interesting to write about - or to read about.
Patrick DeWitt
#60. The initial spark, your affection for the characters, all those things can disappear. It's a perilous thing.
Patrick DeWitt
#61. Bernie Madoff is probably more nuanced then I'm giving him credit for, but I just couldn't get under his skin.
Patrick DeWitt
#62. 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
#63. She wasn't precisely sure what she was walking toward but she wouldn't have turned around for the world.
Patrick DeWitt
#64. 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
#65. Walking away on the springy legs of a foal he thought, How remarkable a thing a lie is. He wondered if it wasn't man's finest achievement, and after some consideration, he decided it was.
Patrick DeWitt
#66. Let us look within ourselves and search out the dormant warrior." "Mine is dormant to the point of non-existence, sir.
Patrick DeWitt
#67. I felt like love has been underrepresented - unironic love, just actually really falling in love.
Patrick DeWitt
#68. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#69. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#70. 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
Patrick DeWitt
#71. My first book didn't even have a Canadian publisher. And that upset me, because I so wanted a readership up there.
Patrick DeWitt
#72. I almost vomited in the boot! I was just about to vomit in the boot! Can you imagine how upset I would have been?
Patrick DeWitt
#73. 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
#74. I don't necessarily want to make people stomp and clap. I simply want to engage people.
Patrick DeWitt
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. Where is your mother, Charlie asked. Dead. I'm sorry to hear that Thank you. But she was always dead.
Patrick DeWitt
#79. The question of likability is a bit of a puzzler for me. You know, I don't write people with likability in mind. It's more whether or not I find them compelling.
Patrick DeWitt
#80. When your protagonist bores you, you're in trouble.
Patrick DeWitt
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. It occurred to him that, much in the way one experiences a brightening when walking beneath a cherry tree in bloom,so too did Klara generate and throw light.
Patrick DeWitt
#84. 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
#85. I felt a premonitory concern they would never revisit it.
Patrick DeWitt
#86. Certain writers look down their noses at plot, and I think I might have been one of them until I tried it.
Patrick DeWitt
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. You are afraid of hell. But that's all religion is, really. Fear of a place we'd rather not be, and where there's no such a thing as suicide to steal us away.
Patrick DeWitt
#90. He is not bad, I don't think. Perhaps he is simply too lazy to be good.
Patrick DeWitt
#91. 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
#92. Why were you feeling low?' 'Why does anyone? It creeps up on you from time to time.
Patrick DeWitt
#93. Often the starting point for characters, for me, is finding a little, most minor detail, and I'll go from there.
Patrick DeWitt
#94. 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
#95. I lay in the dark thinking about the difficulties of family, how crazy and crooked the stories of a bloodline can be.
Patrick DeWitt
#96. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Some wear greed as a fine suit of clothes. But you, my son, bear its stamp ever more poorly.
Patrick DeWitt
#100. 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.
Patrick DeWitt
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