Quotes from Donald E. Westlake

I also wanted Parker to operate in the Internet age without losing being Parker. He's always operated in the world without really being with the world, and cyberspace means that the rest of us are more and more living the same way.

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.

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.

Who's a boy gonna talk to if not his mother?

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.

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.'

Who's a boy gonna talk to if not his mother?

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.

At the moment, the discussion concerned global warming. "The reason for global warming," one of them said as Dortmunder leaned his front against the bar somewhere down to the right of them, "is air conditioners.

If buyer's remorse ever accomplished anything in this world," Max said, "we'd all still be living in caves.

In the cab going downtown, Doug believed he now understood the sensations felt by a person slowly sinking into the grasp of an octopus. Play dead, he told himself. But how?

Real life. The greatest interactive fiction of them all.

However, inflation and unemployment have affected the shopping centers at least as much as the rest of the economy, so that here and there among the brave enticements stood a storefront dark, silent, its windows black, its forehead nameless, its prospects bleak. The survivors seemed to beam the more brightly in their efforts to distract attention from their fallen comrades, but Dortmunder could see them. Dortmunder and a failed enterprise could always recognize one another.

Two days in a row with morning appointments! What kind of evil cloud was he under here, all of a sudden?

Probably nobody ever jogs toward the room where they will write their suicide note

an old Underwood office machine so big and black and ancient it looked as though it should come with a foreign correspondent attached.

The older a man gets...the longer it takes for him to get a grin organized.

I am cuckolding myself

If he were any more crooked, you could open wine bottles with him.

Apart from the scenic majesty of the mountainous countryside, unspoiled by modern, conveniences, there is also the small but vibrant capital city of Quetchyl (pronounced "Clutch"), with its many squares and plazas, each with its magnificent statue of President Malagua, sometimes astride a horse and sometimes not astride a horse.

But after a person has been in analysis for nearly four years, it becomes second nature to automatically study and dissect all dreams and dream fragments. With his mind busily seeking the symbolic content of darkness, rubber masks, and strange voices, he couldn't completely lose control, or remain panic-stricken for very long. "Oh," he said, sighing with relief, "it's just the kidnappers.

In short, the place looked exactly like that section of the socialist realist mural where the workers have been utterly shafted by the plutocrats. Dortmunder looked up, half-expecting to see top hats and cigars in the gloom up there, but nothing.

Good God!" he said. "Are you a faculty wife?

understood that in the business environment it was considered a gesture of civilization to offer the guest something to drink without booze in it, and probably a hostile act to refuse it, so he said, "Seltzer, yeah, sounds good.