If your subject is crime, then you know at least that you're going to have a real story. If your subject is the maturing of a college boy, you may never stumble across a story while you're telling that. But… — Donald E. Westlake Copy Share Image
Science fiction is a weird category, because it's the only area of fiction I can think of where the story is not of primary… — Donald E. Westlake Copy Share Image
The other thing that I got back then - the Parker novels have never had much of anything to do with race. There have been a few black characters here and there, but the first batch of books back then, I got a lot of letters from urban black guys in their 20s, 30s, 40s. What were they seeing that… — Donald E. Westlake Copy Share
I was writing everything. I grew up in Albany, New York, and I was never any farther west than Syracuse, and I wrote Westerns. I wrote tiny little slices of life, sent them off to The Sewanee Review, and they always sent them back. For the first 10 years I was published, I'd say, "I'm a writer disguised as a… — Donald E. Westlake Copy Share
New York doesn't exactly have neighborhoods, the way most cities do. What it has is closer to distinct and separate villages, some of them… — Donald E. Westlake Copy Share Image
“In the cab going downtown, Doug believed he now understood the sensations felt by a person slowly sinking into the grasp of an octopus.… — Donald E. Westlake Copy Share Image
What did Jesus Christ say to the Teamsters? 'Do nothing till I get back. — Donald E. Westlake Copy Share Image
“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,… — Donald E. Westlake Copy Share Image
“Well, you might not think it to look at me,” Dortmunder told him, “but I got a family crest.” “Have you?” “Yeah. And it’s… — Donald E. Westlake Copy Share Image
“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… — Donald E. Westlake Copy Share Image
“Dortmunder followed Kelp as he carried the tray down along the bar past the regulars, where the third was now saying, “The idea of… — Donald E. Westlake Copy Share Image
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.… — Donald E. Westlake Copy Share Image
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… — Donald E. Westlake Copy Share Image
