Donald E. Westlake Quotes
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.
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.
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.
Hoke Moseley is a magnificently battered hero. Willeford brings him to us lean and hard and brand-new.
If it weren't for received ideas, the publishing industry wouldn't have any ideas at all.
If you think of movie studio executives, say, as society, then I root for the independent producers.
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.
All of the changes in publishing since 1960 are significant. There are far fewer publishers.
I make a note, set it aside, and hope it makes sense when the time comes to look at it again.
Everybody in New York is looking for something. Once in a while, somebody finds it.
It's so difficult, particularly with an antisocial character. It's much easier if he's already a blank page, but once you've written on him, it's hard to keep him that stripped down.
Christmas shows us the ties that bind us together, threads of love and caring, woven in the simplest and strongest way within the family.
I do bookstore signings, and it seems to me that I get a variety of men and women, more women than I'd expect, and grown-ups among my readers.
In a funny way, the stories keep themselves alive by emerging from one another. I like that.
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.)
If Chester had a failing, it was that he believed people were what they thought they were.
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.
If you leave me here," the guy on the floor said, "he'll kill me tomorrow morning." Parker looked at him. "So you've still got tonight," he said.
The only thing I learned from the architecture is keep the bathroom and the kitchen near each other, so you don't have to run pipes all over the place.
Writing is flat, so if you only have part of one eye working, you still can do the job. It's just that you sit there and you're angry, which doesn't help.
The thing that I prefer, when I'm working on a book, is to do a seven-day week, because it's easy to lose some of the details of what you're doing along the way.
