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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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" 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

Sisters

Minimal

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

" I haven't read hardly any Westerns, to tell you the truth. "

" 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. "

" 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

Work

Energy

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Patrick deWitt

View

Books

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

" 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

Body

Dead

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

Patrick deWitt

Book

Upset

" I don't know that happy people are interesting to write about - or to read about. "

" 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. "

Patrick deWitt

Work

Know

" I was halfway through a rough draft of 'The Sisters Brothers' when it came time to start the 'Terri' adaptation. "

" I understand the desire to write and read about the death of publishing. It's a perversely and universally appealing topic. "

" I've always felt so fortunate to have writing to turn to every day. I'm obsessed with it. "

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

" 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. "

" Bernie Madoff is probably more nuanced then I'm giving him credit for, but I just couldn't get under his skin. "

" I felt like love has been underrepresented - unironic love, just actually really falling in love. "

" It's healthy to have interests besides books. "

" 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. "

" 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

Road

Thought

" I haven't read a lot of Westerns. But I wrote a Western. The influences were all cinematic. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "