A biography for Patrick deWitthasn’t been written yet.
“It's healthy to have interests besides books.”
“I'm either enjoying myself or I'm not. And if I'm not enjoying myself, something's gone terribly wrong.”
“When you meet someone you love, whether or not they love you back, something occurs in you that makes you want to improve yourself.”
“I kept trying to write these books that were sort of outside of my realm, and I kept failing.”
“I felt like love has been underrepresented - unironic love, just actually really falling in love.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Bernie Madoff is probably more nuanced then I'm giving him credit for, but I just couldn't get under his skin.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I lay in the dark thinking about the difficulties of family, how crazy and crooked the stories of a bloodline can be.”
“If you're not riddled with doubt, you've probably done something wrong.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”