Literary Birthday – 6 March – Patrick deWitt

Seven Quotes

1. We can all of us be hurt, and no one is exclusively safe from worry and sadness.
2. Most people are chained to their own fear and stupidity and haven’t the sense to level a cold eye at just what is wrong with their lives. Most people will continue on, dissatisfied but never attempting to understand why, or how they might change things for the better, and they die with nothing in their hearts but dirt and old, thin blood – weak blood, diluted – and their memories aren’t worth a goddamned thing.
3. Hurried business is bad business.
4. Luck was something you either earned or invented through strength of character. You had to come by it honestly; you could not trick or bluff your way into it.
5. You put a wage behind something, it gives the act a sort of respectability.
6. …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.
7. Work will drive you crazy if you let it.

Patrick deWitt is a Canadian novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of Help Yourself Help Yourself, Ablutions, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice book, and The Sisters Brothers, was shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize.

Source for photo: librairie mollat, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Patrick_deWitt_(2018).png

 by Amanda Patterson

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