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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.
Donald E. Westlake
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Donald E. Westlake
Age: 75 †
Born: 1933
Born: July 12
Died: 2008
Died: December 31
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
John B. Allan
Judson Jack Carmichael
Curt Clark
Timothy J. Culver
J. Morgan Cunningham
Richard Stark
Edwin West
Tucker Coe
Sheldon Lord
Donald Edwin Westlake
Mind
Though
Stark
Wrong
Occasionally
Whatever
Calls
Idea
Somewhere
Two
Usually
Sulking
Ideas
Works
Drifts
Wells
Return
Alternate
Well
Guy
Starks
More quotes by Donald E. Westlake
Hoke Moseley is a magnificently battered hero. Willeford brings him to us lean and hard and brand-new.
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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.
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A grifter's got an irresistible urge to be the guy who's wise. There's nothin' to whipping a fool. Hell, fools are made to be whipped. But to take another pro. Even your partner, who knows you and has his eye on you. That's a score! No matter what happens.
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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.
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What did Jesus Christ say to the Teamsters? 'Do nothing till I get back.
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If you leave me here, the guy on the floor said, he'll kill me tomorrow morning. Parker looked at him. So you've still got tonight, he said.
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The trouble with real life is, there's no reset button.
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The thing that I prefer, when I'm working on a book, is to do a seven-day week, because it's easy to lose some of the details of what you're doing along the way.
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It's so difficult, particularly with an antisocial character. It's much easier if he's already a blank page, but once you've written on him, it's hard to keep him that stripped down.
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My mother believed in all superstitions, plus she made some up.
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The British were doing crime stories first, but the British thing is a very different thing. There, the stories are about restoring a break in the fabric of society. The American thing has never been worrying about breaks in the fabric of society, but about people doing their job, whether it's police procedurals or criminals or whatever.
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I make a note, set it aside, and hope it makes sense when the time comes to look at it again.
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The fictioneer labors under the constraint of plausibility his inventions must stay within the capacity of the audience to accept and believe. God, of course, working with facts, faces no limitation.
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If Chester had a failing, it was that he believed people were what they thought they were.
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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 if your story is a college boy dead in his dorm room, you know there's a story in there, someplace.
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In order to hold your faith intact be sure it's kept unsullied by fact.
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Who's a boy gonna talk to if not his mother?
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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.
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I do bookstore signings, and it seems to me that I get a variety of men and women, more women than I'd expect, and grown-ups among my readers.
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Nobody gets everything in this life. You decide your priorities and you make your choices. I'd decided long ago that any cake I had would be eaten.
Donald E. Westlake
