Quotes from Donald E. Westlake

But other things had added to Jerry's present weird mood, his new view of himself as someone who'd suddenly found he was in a six-foot-deep rut when all along he'd thought of himself as sailing.

Why, Wally," he said. "Except for leaving out the part where Tom continues to be a homicidal maniac, it's all the truth.

Like the residents of Brigadoon, the people in the church drifted in a long and dreamless sleep, freed of struggle and expectation.

mother of the bride had been determined that her daughter would have a church wedding, and women who successfully name their infant daughters Tiffany do tend to get their own way, so an evening wedding it was.

This Mikey," Kelp said, "he's the son of a mob guy, which is even worse than a mob guy. He came up soft, and he thinks he's hard.

There are no Territories to light out for, not in this century. It was no longer easy to become the new you. New or old, you were already you.

wish you would." "Right. When I had the emerald again, I was in a cell. I guess they were afraid the rest of the guys might try to spring me right away, 'cause they hid me out in a precinct on the Upper West Side for the first

found himself marveling at how many different names there are in this world. All individual, most pronounceable. Think of that.

A terrified man can have an accident much more readily and much more quickly than a calm man.

Since he'd been born rich into a family that had been a long time rich, he'd never known the need to suppress his feelings, so he pouted completely and might even have stamped his foot again, except he sensed that a kind of lumpish stillness might better illustrate the sulk he'd fallen into.

Bobbi doubted there was ever much future for a couple who had nothing in common except heterosexuality.

Since the conversation had deteriorated to a loop, Dortmunder abandoned it and looked out his window instead at the thin sunlight out there, until Murch's Mom made the right turn onto Eighth Avenue and sank contentedly into the perpetual blockage there, a traffic snarl well into its second century, running—or not running—from below Penn Station up to above the Port Authority bus terminal.

Never for a second did their characterizations slip, did their play-acting lapse; what had happened had not happened, nothing had changed, there were no clouds in their sky, there was nothing but frivolousness and nonchalance. They were merely amused by one another, and not terribly involved together emotionally at all.

There were other ways to live. You could do something else, if you wanted. And if you had a reason.

now he was requesting as much microfilm as the librarians would let him have at one time, and was buzzing it all through the viewer with such speed that the machine was actually rocking on the table. (Several other researchers, with the frowns of elephants disturbed at their feeding, had gathered up their own materials and moved

That was the annoying thing about the kid, who was otherwise okay. Every once in a while, he'd get it before anybody else got it, and when he got it, he got it. So Tiny said to him, "If you got it, give it to us.

It's only the fool who, because he's fallen once from grace, believes he should never have tried to be in the state of grace to begin with.

You're too cheap. You'd make me nervous to work for you. I'd come to you for a gun, you wouldn't want to give me more than one bullet.

But airport security is meant mostly to impress honest citizens and insurance companies, and secondarily to catch hijackers and other crazies. There is no security against a man with his own truck and his own clipboard, and Inter-Air Forwarding was a safe, reliable financial success from the beginning.

Beyond that he was a ghost of Uganda; in this nation of his birth he was under a death sentence for the simple crime of having lived. And he was the ghost of his father's dream of security and continuity, there was no security, and this age was the enemy of continuity. Every man stands on the freight-car roof. We fall and fall, our feet planted on the solid surface, and the only question is how long before we hit.

Oh, I know you like being a rogue," she assured me. "What the English call a chancer. You're unfaithful to the entire world, so why are you faithful to your wife?

Dortmunder lifted his gaze from his reproachful knees, and contemplated, without love, the clothing Andy Kelp had forced him into. He said, "Who wears this stuff?" "Americans," Kelp told him. "Don't they have mirrors in America?

Or, maybe it would be better to slam seven or eight elevated superhighways across the island, knocking down everything in the way, like Robert Moses wanted.

Los Angeles isn't a tank town." "The hell it isn't. Los Angeles is three Long Islands next to each other. But no Midtown Tunnel.