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
I'm one of the narrative-push people. I don't outline, I don't plan ahead. So I'm my first reader, telling myself the story as I'm going along. Since I haven't designed it ahead of time, each day I have to be… — 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… — Donald E. Westlake Copy Share Image
I was writing everything. I grew up in Albany, New York, and I was never any farther west than Syracuse, and I wrote Westerns.… — Donald E. Westlake Copy Share Image
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
“There are no Territories to light out for, not in this century. It was no longer easy to become the new you. New or… — Donald E. Westlake Copy Share Image
“wish you would.” “Right. When I had the emerald again, I was in a cell. I guess they were afraid the rest of the… — Donald E. Westlake Copy Share Image
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… — Donald E. Westlake Copy Share Image
