Donald E. Westlake Quotes

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.

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.

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, never pull his punches. Better for him, better for me.

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.

If you think of movie studio executives, say, as society, then I root for the independent producers.