Donald E. Westlake Quotes

30 quotes in 639 categories

• Publishing is the only industry I can think of where most of the employees spend most of their time stating with great self-assurance that they…
• In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by…
• Hoke Moseley is a magnificently battered hero. Willeford brings him to us lean and hard and brand-new.
• 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…
• Whenever things sound easy, it turns out there's one part you didn't hear.
• 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…
• Sorry; I have no space left for advice. Just do it.
• 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…
• 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,…
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• I make a note, set it aside, and hope it makes sense when the time comes to look at it again.
• If you think of movie studio executives, say, as society, then I root for the independent producers.
• If it weren't for received ideas, the publishing industry wouldn't have any ideas at all.
• All of the changes in publishing since 1960 are significant. There are far fewer publishers.
• Everybody in New York is looking for something. Once in a while, somebody finds it.
• In order to hold your faith intact be sure it's kept unsullied by fact.

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