Words matter. These are the best Donald E. Westlake Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
A guy named Peter Rabe wrote a batch of books for Gold Medal in the ’50s, and he was absolutely the single largest influence on writing style. I was completely in love with the way the man wrote.
If it weren’t for received ideas, the publishing industry wouldn’t have any ideas at all.
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.
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.
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.
The tortured similes, the brooding introspection, the jaundiced view of society – nobody ever has any fun in a Ross Macdonald book.
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.
Westlake is allusive, indirect, referential, a bit rococo, Stark strips his sentences down to the necessary information.
I did the first Parker novel, in which he got caught, and the editor at Pocket Books took me to lunch and said, ‘Is there any way that this guy could get away at the end, and you could do three books a year for us?’ And I said, ‘I think so.’
Everybody in New York is looking for something. Once in a while, somebody finds it.
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.
Sorry; I have no space left for advice. Just do it.
