A biography for Patrick deWitthasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“My first book didn't even have a Canadian publisher. And that upset me, because I so wanted a readership up there.”
“Unfunny people should be locked up, the key tossed into a smelter.”
“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.”
“I don't necessarily want to make people stomp and clap. I simply want to engage people.”
“I know a lot of people who use the Internet really wisely. It enriches their lives in some way.”
“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 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.”
“The initial spark, your affection for the characters, all those things can disappear. It's a perilous thing.”
“I've always felt so fortunate to have writing to turn to every day. I'm obsessed with it.”
“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.”
“If I were to continue to work in an established mode, it stands to reason the work would be limited by this - that it would never surpass the prior work in quality.”
“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.”
“Looking around, I saw so many unhappy adults, people who loathed their jobs, and I didn't want to be one of them.”
“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.”
“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.”
“'The Sisters Brothers' started out as a little bit of dialogue between these two men who became Eli and Charlie Sisters.”
“I'm not an enormous proponent of plot as a reader. It's about other things; my reading has become specialized over the years.”
“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.”
“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.”