Helen DeWitt Quotes & Sayings

I didn't want to go to sleep knowing I would just wake up in the morning. — Helen DeWitt

Something looked through my grandfather's eyes. It said Being an accountant, it's not the end of the world.
Something looked at my Uncle Danny. Something looked at my aunts and it said A secretary, is that so terrible?
Linda had seen four before her do something that was not so terrible and already there was something about them, their whole lives ahead of them and the best thing cut off, as if something that might have been a Heifetz had been walled up inside an accountant and left to die.
Doom. Doom. Doom. — Helen DeWitt

I thought suddenly Look. If Kambei had stopped recruiting when the first samurai didn't work out a 205-minute masterpiece of modern cinema would have been over at minute 32. — Helen DeWitt

Well, I don't see any other ones around... — Helen DeWitt

WE APPROXIMATE THE BIRD'S BODY BY A SPHERE OF RADIUS 5CM, said Sib, I had no idea aerodynamics was so entertaining — Helen DeWitt

If you were at school they would not let you read a book like this, they would keep you from reading it by involving you in sport. — Helen DeWitt

In her excitement at the idea of just walking out the door she had walked out the door without stopping to practice and without even her sheet music, and now she had nothing to play from and nothing prepared.
Some people might have been daunted by this setback. The Konigsbergs faced musical catastrophe on a daily basis, & their motto was: Never say die. — Helen DeWitt

He liked I expect the idea of effortless excellence, and being unable to combine the two has settled for the one he could be sure of ... — Helen DeWitt

Sometimes my mother did practice but one thing led to another and sometimes she did not. The advice of the homely man was something of a curse. She would not practice at all if she could not practice right so that gradually she played less and less and sometimes not at all.
I used to think that things might have been different. Gieseking never played a scale and Glenn Gould hardly practiced at all, they would just look at the score and think and think and think. If the homely man had said to go away and think this would have been every bit as revolutionary a concept for a Konigsberg. Perhaps he even thought that you had to think. But you can't show someone how to think in an hour; you can give someone an exercise to take away. — Helen DeWitt

The typical review makes a Teletubby look like a sabre-toothed tiger. You can economize by reading online rather than squandering $4.95, yes, but all you get is people pusillanimously Favoriting and Liking and Friending. Why is there no Hate button? Why? — Helen DeWitt

So Lucille pressed the button, and a panel slid open in the wall, and the transporter came through, and sure enough here was the bare butt of the client waiting to be whipped. For reasons best known to himself he had kept his shoes and socks on, so he was wearing well-polished black loafers and black silk socks. — Helen DeWitt

The master swordsman isn't interested in killing people. He only wants to perfect his art. — Helen DeWitt

Well, there's good fiction. There are wonderful books, and yes, it's good to read them. Maybe if you've read a lot of fiction, you reach this stage of satiation, and you start thinking well, what's the point, but then you talk to people who've read barely any, and you realize that things you take for granted if you've read a lot of fiction - unreliable narrators, how language frames your perception of people - things that seem obvious to the point of banality, except they're not to people who aren't in the habit of reading fiction. — Helen DeWitt

It's not against Lottery regulations to lose, obviously - somebody's got to - but it's against the Rules to be seen to lose. It's against the Rules to be seen to win. It's not just that you break the Rules by sitting there. It's that you put everyone else in the position of ostentatious Rulebreakers, manoeuvred into flashing their luck just by walking to work. — Helen DeWitt

[ ... ] and unfortunately most women did not seem to have the same urges. Or if they did, they wouldn't admit it. They probably didn't, anyway. But if they did they wouldn't admit it. — Helen DeWitt

Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure; all take their turns of retardation ... .Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance, said Sib, was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualities. — Helen DeWitt

There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark. There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom. — Helen DeWitt

Sorabji's hair was long and matted, as was his beard. He'd spent six months in a tropical sun, and was now dark brown. His clothes had been disgusting after the first week; following local custom he had taken to wearing his shirt as a loincloth. Sorabji always liked to say that the unfortunate consul had travelled hundreds of miles into the interior to rescue a British citizen, only to find Gunga Din. It was true that the loincloth had come from Gieves & Hawkes, but this was not something you'd notice on a casual inspection. — Helen DeWitt

On the day of the party I walked down to Covent Garden at lunchtime to buy a dress, and on my way to Boules I thought I would just stop off for a moment at Books etc. — Helen DeWitt

I felt ashamed, really ashamed of all the years I'd spent trying to identify the father who happened to be mine, instead of simply claiming the best on offer. — Helen DeWitt

Sometimes I rode the Circle Line reading a book on organic chemistry and sometimes I read Leave It to Psmith for the 20th or 21st time and sometimes I watched Jeremy Brett's marvellous grotesque Sherlock Holmes or of course Seven Samurai. I sometimes went out for Tennessee Fried Chicken.
Day followed day. A year went by. — Helen DeWitt

When you play a piece of music there are so many different ways you could play it. You keep asking yourself what if. You try this and you say what if and you try that. When you buy a CD you get one answer to the question. You never get the what if. — Helen DeWitt

His youngest sister, Linda, wanted to be a singer and she had now refused point-blank to go to secretarial college; his father had refused pointblank to let her study music. Linda had gone to the piano and begun to play Chopin's Prelude No. 24 in D minor, a bitter piece of music which gains in tragic intensity when played 40 times in a row. — Helen DeWitt

Here was a man who'd learned to write before he could think, a man who threw out logical fallacies like tacks behind a getaway car, and he always always always got away. — Helen DeWitt

I wish you wouldn't say the first thing that comes into your head, Ludo. There is an obvious difference between someone who works within the technical limitations of his time which are beyond his control and someone who accepts without thinking limitations which are entirely within his own power to set aside. — Helen DeWitt

Perhaps this is the root of all evil, that gardeners are not put in charge of our schools. — Helen DeWitt

Once he had a foot in the door he explained, "It's not for me to make moral judgments. I'm a businessman. I deal with people as they are, not as they ought to be." "Speaking — Helen DeWitt

A brilliant white light beat pitilessly down, like the fierce desert sun at midday on the French Foreign Legion; the glittering floor dazzled the eye with the cruel desert glare. We walked slowly through the cereals. — Helen DeWitt

If you don't like a language, you can go write your own. — Helen DeWitt

I got home and I thought I should stop leading so aimless an existence. It is harder than you might think to stop leading an existence, & if you can't do that the only thing you can do is try to introduce an element of purposefulness ... and though I might have to wait another 30 or 40 years for my body to join the non-sentient things in the world at least in the meantime it would be a less absolutely senseless sentience. OK. — Helen DeWitt

The reason is that even in a fantasy there is nothing even remotely erotic about a toilet bowl. In fact, considered as an accoutrement to a sexual encounter, a toilet bowl is a real cold shower. — Helen DeWitt

I once read somewhere that Sean Connery left school at the age of 13 and later went on to read Proust and Finnegans Wake and I keep expecting to meet an enthusiastic school leaver on the train, the type of person who only ever reads something because it is marvellous (and so hated school). Unfortunately the enthusiastic school leavers are all minding their own business. — Helen DeWitt

He only tells the story once but you see it from about 8 points of view, you have to pay attention the whole time to see whether something seems to be true or is just what somebody says is true. — Helen DeWitt

The writer who is literally an addict, the writer who can't help himself, the writer who HAS to write, can never be anything but an amateur, because the industry requires the professional to put writing on hold not just for a day or two, or a week, but for years. — Helen DeWitt

There is a strange taboo in our society against ending something merely because it is not pleasant
life, love, a conversation, you name it, the etiquette is that you must begin in ignorance & persevere in the face of knowledge, & though I naturally believe that this is profoundly wrong it's not nice to go around constantly offending people. — Helen DeWitt

My mother practiced hours every day, hours as painful to hear as to play. At first everybody thought she would give in. Day followed day, and the terrible stumbling sounds went on for hours on end.
She did not know what else to do. — Helen DeWitt

Yamamoto said he thought you had to be able to hear how something did not work as part of a bigger thing to hear how it did and it was precisely because people couldn't hear that that they were willing to let movements be taken out of pieces. — Helen DeWitt

If you're a salesman, you have to deal with yourself the way you are. Not how you'd like to be.
If you don't have what it takes, you can waste a lot of time asking yourself "How can I get what it takes?" The question you should be asking yourself is, "Is there something else that takes what I have to offer?" Because if there's something you can succeed at, just the way you are, you won't have to waste a lot of time trying to change yourself. Which you're never going to be able to do, anyway. — Helen DeWitt