Top 59 Donald E. Westlake Quotes
#1. Once he became a series character, I made the conscious choice that he would never act like a series character, never wink at the reader, never pull his punches. Better for him, better for me.
Donald E. Westlake
#2. A grifter's got an irresistible urge to be the guy who's wise. There's nothin' to whipping a fool. Hell, fools are made to be whipped. But to take another pro. Even your partner, who knows you and has his eye on you. That's a score! No matter what happens.
Donald E. Westlake
#3. huddled together at the left end of the bar, as silent and miserable as kittens in a sack with the bridge getting close.
Donald E. Westlake
#5. The fictioneer labors under the constraint of plausibility; his inventions must stay within the capacity of the audience to accept and believe. God, of course, working with facts, faces no limitation.
Donald E. Westlake
#6. Found himself marveling at how many different names there are in this world. All individual, most pronounceable. Think of that.
Donald E. Westlake
#7. I also wanted Parker to operate in the Internet age without losing being Parker. He's always operated in the world without really being with the world, and cyberspace means that the rest of us are more and more living the same way.
Donald E. Westlake
#8. In order to hold your faith intact be sure it's kept unsullied by fact.
Donald E. Westlake
#9. If you think of movie studio executives, say, as society, then I root for the independent producers.
Donald E. Westlake
#11. Those 4 guys in the late 60's who attacked a jewel merchant on New York's West 46th St. on the sidewalk, so they could steal his jewel-filled station wagon, which they abandoned 2 blocks later because none of them could drive a stick shift. Where would I be without such people?
Donald E. Westlake
#13. Everybody in New York is looking for something. Once in a while, somebody finds it.
Donald E. Westlake
#14. I start with the story, almost in the old campfire sense, and the story leads to both the characters, which actors should best be cast in this story, and the language. The choice of words, more than anything else, creates the feeling that the story gives off.
Donald E. Westlake
#15. That's a geometric figure, that bird, he don't exist without an angle.
Donald E. Westlake
#16. Since he'd been born rich into a family that had been a long time rich, he'd never known the need to suppress his feelings, so he pouted completely and might even have stamped his foot again, except he sensed that a kind of lumpish stillness might better illustrate the sulk he'd fallen into.
Donald E. Westlake
#17. I loved it, but social reality impeded. Now I wander in here at 9 in the morning or so, and come back for a while in the afternoon. I am a very lenient boss.
Donald E. Westlake
#18. Probably nobody ever jogs toward the room where they will write their suicide note,
Donald E. Westlake
#19. When Stark isn't off sulking somewhere, or whatever he's doing when he won't return my calls, I alternate between the two. That usually works well, though occasionally an idea for the wrong guy drifts through my mind.
Donald E. Westlake
#20. It was apparent...that, all over America, thousands of people threw down a book or got up from a television show and said, 'I can write better than that!' It was amazing how many of them were wrong.
Donald E. Westlake
#22. Dortmunder followed Kelp as he carried the tray down along the bar past the regulars, where the third was now saying, The idea of the flat tax is, you just pay the same as one month's rent.
Donald E. Westlake
#23. In the cab going downtown, Doug believed he now understood the sensations felt by a person slowly sinking into the grasp of an octopus. Play dead, he told himself. But how?
Donald E. Westlake
#24. an old Underwood office machine so big and black and ancient it looked as though it should come with a foreign correspondent attached.
Donald E. Westlake
#25. Hispanics have a long tradition of defiance against authority. Come to that, the Irish and Italians and Jews also have a long tradition of defiance against authority. Thinking it over, everybody has a long tradition of defiance against authority. (Except the Germans, of course.)
Donald E. Westlake
#26. Two days in a row with morning appointments! What kind of evil cloud was he under here, all of a sudden?
Donald E. Westlake
#27. What did Jesus Christ say to the Teamsters? 'Do nothing till I get back.
Donald E. Westlake
#28. They turned and found themselves facing a bullet head on an ICBM body lumpily stuffed into a black shirt and a brown suit. It was as though King Kong were making a break for it, hoping to smuggle himself back to his island disguised as a human being.
Donald E. Westlake
#29. There are no Territories to light out for, not in this century. It was no longer easy to become the new you. New or old, you were already you.
Donald E. Westlake
#31. telling the jokes - was the setups. Why were that priest, that rabbi, and that minister walking down that street? Where were they headed? How had they happened to come together? What odd chance had put ex-presidents Bush, Clinton, and Carter on that same plane?
Donald E. Westlake
#32. The many magazines, ranging from pulp to slick, that used to serve as both farm teams for writers and lures to readers, with hundreds of short stories every month, don't exist. Most of the doors for new people have been sealed.
Donald E. Westlake
#33. Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every page he ever wrote.
Donald E. Westlake
#34. Zachary's partner, a younger man with a moustache named Freedly - Well, no. The man was named Freedly. Zachary's partner, a younger man named Freedly with a moustache - Zachary's partner, a moustached younger man named Freedly - Freedly said, "Have you got the ring on you?
Donald E. Westlake
#35. Nothing about it interested me. Or about anything else, except making up stories. If literacy weren't so nearly universal, God knows what I'd be. A drain on the State, I shouldn't wonder.
Donald E. Westlake
#36. I make a note, set it aside, and hope it makes sense when the time comes to look at it again.
Donald E. Westlake
#37. A friend of mine, now retired, was then a major exec at a major bank, and one of her jobs, the last four years, was the farewell interview.
Donald E. Westlake
#38. At the moment, the discussion concerned global warming. "The reason for global warming," one of them said as Dortmunder leaned his front against the bar somewhere down to the right of them, "is air conditioners.
Donald E. Westlake
#39. What advice I would give to anybody about anything. Life is a slow-motion avalanche, and none of us are steering. (When asked in an interview about what question he's tired of being asked.)
Donald E. Westlake
#42. Like the residents of Brigadoon, the people in the church drifted in a long and dreamless sleep, freed of struggle and expectation.
Donald E. Westlake
#43. Wish you would." "Right. When I had the emerald again, I was in a cell. I guess they were afraid the rest of the guys might try to spring me right away, 'cause they hid me out in a precinct on the Upper West Side for the first
Donald E. Westlake
#44. Whenever things sound easy, it turns out there's one part you didn't hear.
Donald E. Westlake
#45. If buyer's remorse ever accomplished anything in this world," Max said, "we'd all still be living in caves.
Donald E. Westlake
#46. If Chester had a failing, it was that he believed people were what they thought they were.
Donald E. Westlake
#47. Bobbi doubted there was ever much future for a couple who had nothing in common except heterosexuality.
Donald E. Westlake
#48. As we struggle with shopping lists and invitations, compounded by December's bad weather, it is good to be reminded that there are people in our lives who are worth this aggravation, and people to whom we are worth the same.
Donald E. Westlake
#49. My work schedule has changed over the years. The one constant is, when at work on a novel, I try to work seven days a week, so as not to lose touch with that world. Within that, I'm flexible on hours and output.
Donald E. Westlake
#50. Hoke Moseley is a magnificently battered hero. Willeford brings him to us lean and hard and brand-new.
Donald E. Westlake
#52. You wanna know what's happening to New York?" he asked. "I tell you what you do. You go to a used-magazine store, you look at the covers of science fiction magazines from the thirties. That's what's happening to New York.
Donald E. Westlake
#53. Why, Wally," he said. "Except for leaving out the part where Tom continues to be a homicidal maniac, it's all the truth.
Donald E. Westlake
#54. If it weren't for received ideas, the publishing industry wouldn't have any ideas at all.
Donald E. Westlake
#55. Nobody gets everything in this life. You decide your priorities and you make your choices. I'd decided long ago that any cake I had would be eaten.
Donald E. Westlake
#56. Dortmunder and the Major strolled away down the long corridor overlooking customs, with the duty-free shops on one side of the corridor and on the other side the railing where people can stand and look down at their returning relatives and visiting foreign friends being degraded.
Donald E. Westlake
#58. All of the changes in publishing since 1960 are significant. There are far fewer publishers.
Donald E. Westlake
#59. Mother of the bride had been determined that her daughter would have a church wedding, and women who successfully name their infant daughters Tiffany do tend to get their own way, so an evening wedding it was.
Donald E. Westlake
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