79 Quotes by Donald E. Westlake

Whenever things sound easy, it turns out there’s one part you didn’t hear.

I am cuckolding myself.

If it weren’t for received ideas, the publishing industry wouldn’t have any ideas at all.

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, though occasionally an idea for the wrong guy drifts through my mind.

Who’s a boy gonna talk to if not his mother?

The August sun, God’s blood-blister...

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.

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.

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.