Donald E. Westlake Quotes
I've used pseudonyms for various reasons. In my earliest days I was writing too much, and needed to shift some of the product over to other front men. I've also done it to establish the different tones of the different writings: Stark doesn't write very much like Westlake at all.
Quotes to Explore
-
I know I can serve Hawaii and our country well in the U.S. Senate, know we can mount a solid statewide campaign, know we have a good chance of prevailing.
-
What are the relationships between power and knowledge? There are two bad, short answers: 1. Knowledge provides an instrument that those in power can wield for their own ends. 2. A new body of knowledge brings into being a new class of people or institutions that can exercise a new kind of power.
-
I live for my work, apart from my family who come first. And I live to tell stories and pretend to be other people, it's something I've been doing since I was 3 years old. Maybe it's because I'm intrinsically bored with myself, and I find other people more interesting.
-
Men look like pandas when they try and put make-up on.
-
You learn from things that you experience in life. I'd never want to say that I regret anything or that anything was a mistake. Honestly, that isn't how I have chosen to live my life.
-
But I think we need the international market.
-
I moved to New York when I was 21 and worked between 40 and 70 hours a week. Then I invested it all. It was really just a hustle. But I was kind of raised to work like that, so to me, it seemed very normal and natural.
-
You're in the lap of the gods. If people go, they go, and if they don't.
-
All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
-
I grew up in a suburb of Ohio, in a small town, and I resonated with that small-town feeling where everybody knows your business.
-
All things can corrupt when minds are prone to evil.
-
In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.
-
Sometimes I thank God... for cheeseburgers.
-
Like many people, most Libertarians feel empathy and sympathy for less fortunate people. But they know you can't have perfection in a world of limited resources.
-
As a lot of the venture capital world seems to be shifting away from consumer, we want to make sure that consumer entrepreneurs know there's still money available.
-
Most of what happens in the world is far beyond a dog's comprehension, so they must turn to their faith in us to help them navigate life's treacheries. Don't we, also, have unanswerable questions about the vagaries of modern existence for which the answer is beyond human grasp, so that only our faith can guide us?
-
What I love about 'Midnight Train' is that it's a song about a journey, but the music actually takes you on that journey. It feels like you're moving through the whole song.
-
I was a pretty nice kid. Kind of quiet, but quiet in terms I wasn't going out and setting fire to anything. I had a big mouth and I was creative type, you know.
-
The science [of global warming] is beyond dispute... Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response
-
I started writing to reassure myself that I was still all here.
-
Relationships become rocky when men and women fail to acknowledge they are biologically different and when each expects the other to live up to their expectations. Much of the stress we experience in relationships comes from the false belief that men and women are now the same and have the same priorities, drives and desires.
-
I have no patience for those in the American Jewish community who just go around slandering people as anti-Semites without realizing that what they're doing is really trivializing anti-Semitism.
-
Once upon a time, I was a workaholic clocking more than 80 hours per week. That changed after I began to write. I now work only around 35 hours per week. I do not work on weekends because these are the days that I use for research as well as for my writing.
-
I've used pseudonyms for various reasons. In my earliest days I was writing too much, and needed to shift some of the product over to other front men. I've also done it to establish the different tones of the different writings: Stark doesn't write very much like Westlake at all.
