Donald E. Westlake Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I can create institutions, but I can't rewrite the chips in people's heads.
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Being a celebrity, I don't even have to talk.
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Words aren't very good at describing complicated, strange visual things. You can try, and the reader will have some sort of image in their mind, but words aren't good at that.
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I'm not really a piano player, but I play enough to get away with it.
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From the happy-go-lucky days of oil exploration and drilling, when a lot of easy sources were being found and easily managed, we're gotten ourselves into this sort of apocalyptic time. We're willing to destroy almost everything, risk almost anything, and go ahead with techniques for which we have no way of responding to the known problems.
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Before every show, we get into a circle, hold hands, and someone makes a speech. Most bands are too cool for that.
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Many people think fairy tales and retellings of fairy tales are only for children, but I'm not the only writer to take an old tale and retell it for a sophisticated adult audience.
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If you realize you aren't so wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you're wiser today.
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Newark might be one of few the places where the politics is tougher than even Brooklyn.
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Americans are very easygoing people. If the added attention and great visibility that I have been able to generate can help open doors and expose more Chinese to American values and the American way of life, that is great.
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For me, what I really want to come out of it is to show people that I can hold together a movie, be the number one character and play someone who is twenty or twenty-one.
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You're always going to have people that are naysayers, that don't believe in your talent, that don't believe that you have any kind of longevity.
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I didn't want to just do a show where my character stood out and other characters were flat or one-to-two-dimensional. I wanted everybody to have meat.
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A lot of women in sport tend to take on a very masculine, aggressive look. They want to be perceived as being strong and powerful. I never lost that sense of wanting to retain my femininity.
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I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him.
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Warwick Davies is a cracking actor. The opening scene in the last 'Harry Potter' film, where he plays a captured Griphook, is mesmerising. His pacing is sublime, and the menace and regret he builds into the scene is fantastic.
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I never have been a coder, outside of when I was twelve or something, like on the Atari 1200 XP or whatever I had.
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I don't particularly like L.A.
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My biggest musical influences are probably my parents.
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In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.
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Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence.
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I grew up doing a lot of traveling. My mom left home when she was 15 and traveled to 48 different countries and speaks six different languages. So I grew up with my eyes open. She raised me so that if my heart says something is wrong, I have to go help. What's right is right and what's wrong is wrong.
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Eyes wide and blank as the buttons on a first Communion coat.
