79 Quotes by Donald E. Westlake

Westlake is allusive, indirect, referential, a bit rococo, Stark strips his sentences down to the necessary information.

I started writing when I was 11. In my late teens, I was writing short stories of every conceivable type and sent them to everything from 'Future Science Fiction' to 'The Sewanee Review.'

With writing, I prefer the solo effort, but when a team is working right, as it did on 'The Grifters,' boy, it's exhilarating.

The tortured similes, the brooding introspection, the jaundiced view of society - nobody ever has any fun in a Ross Macdonald book.

I love Hammett, never liked Chandler - I'm one of the few.

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.

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.'