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" 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

Time

Think

Nothing

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

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

" 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? "

" I heard somewhere that whenever you write a book, people will ask you One Question about it over and over. And while I'm no expert in these matters, this is proving to be true. My first book dealt with a not-that-pleasant degenerate type, and the One Question was, 'Is this an autobiographical story?' "

" 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. "

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

" 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

Knowing

Going

" Working in a bar was a horrific idea for me. "

Patrick deWitt

Horrific

Working

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" As a reader I want to be present and entertained. I don't want to be taught lessons, and I don't want to be spoken down to. I want to be treated as a peer and to be made to feel welcome. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "