Top 40 Donald E. Westlake Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The trouble with real life is, there’s no reset button.”

— Donald E. Westlake

2. “As we struggle with shopping lists and invitations, compounded by December’s bad weather, it is good to be reminded that there are people in our lives who are worth this aggravation, and people to whom we are worth the same.”

— Donald E. Westlake

3. “Nobody gets everything in this life. You decide your priorities and you make your choices. I’d decided long ago that any cake I had would be eaten.”

— Donald E. Westlake

4. “When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.”

— Donald E. Westlake

5. “Sorry; I have no space left for advice. Just do it.”

— Donald E. Westlake

6. “Christmas shows us the ties that bind us together, threads of love and caring, woven in the simplest and strongest way within the family.”

— Donald E. Westlake

7. “That’s a geometric figure, that bird, he don’t exist without an angle.”

— Donald E. Westlake

8. “I am cuckolding myself.”

— Donald E. Westlake

9. “Everybody in New York is looking for something. Once in a while, somebody finds it.”

— Donald E. Westlake

10. “Whenever things sound easy, it turns out there’s one part you didn’t hear.”

— Donald E. Westlake

11. “In order to hold your faith intact be sure it’s kept unsullied by fact.”

— Donald E. Westlake

12. “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.”

— Donald E. Westlake

13. “If Chester had a failing, it was that he believed people were what they thought they were.”

— Donald E. Westlake

14. “When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away.”

— Donald E. Westlake

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

— Donald E. Westlake

16. “Eyes wide and blank as the buttons on a first Communion coat.”

— Donald E. Westlake

17. “Hoke Moseley is a magnificently battered hero. Willeford brings him to us lean and hard and brand-new.”

— Donald E. Westlake

18. “The fictioneer labors under the constraint of plausibility; his inventions must stay within the capacity of the audience to accept and believe. God, of course, working with facts, faces no limitation.”

— Donald E. Westlake

19. “Who’s a boy gonna talk to if not his mother?”

— Donald E. Westlake

20. “When Stark isn’t off sulking somewhere, or whatever he’s doing when he won’t return my calls, I alternate between the two. That usually works well, though occasionally an idea for the wrong guy drifts through my mind.”

— Donald E. Westlake

21. “I make a note, set it aside, and hope it makes sense when the time comes to look at it again.”

— Donald E. Westlake

22. “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.”

— Donald E. Westlake

23. “If it weren’t for received ideas, the publishing industry wouldn’t have any ideas at all.”

— Donald E. Westlake

24. “The August sun, God’s blood-blister...”

— Donald E. Westlake

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

— Donald E. Westlake

26. “All of the changes in publishing since 1960 are significant. There are far fewer publishers.”

— Donald E. Westlake

27. “My mother believed in all superstitions, plus she made some up.”

— Donald E. Westlake

28. “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.”

— Donald E. Westlake

29. “Dortmunder and the Major strolled away down the long corridor overlooking customs, with the duty-free shops on one side of the corridor and on the other side the railing where people can stand and look down at their returning relatives and visiting foreign friends being degraded.”

— Donald E. Westlake

30. “Zachary’s partner, a younger man with a moustache named Freedly – Well, no. The man was named Freedly. Zachary’s partner, a younger man named Freedly with a moustache – Zachary’s partner, a moustached younger man named Freedly – Freedly said, “Have you got the ring on you?”

— Donald E. Westlake

31. “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.”

— Donald E. Westlake

32. “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.”

— Donald E. Westlake

33. “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.”

— Donald E. Westlake

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

— Donald E. Westlake

35. “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.”

— Donald E. Westlake

36. “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.”

— Donald E. Westlake

37. “A friend of mine, now retired, was then a major exec at a major bank, and one of her jobs, the last four years, was the farewell interview.”

— Donald E. Westlake

38. “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.”

— Donald E. Westlake

39. “After a summer as jam-packed with incident as Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, the fall and winter of 1967 passed with placid serenity on the island of Anguilla, as free from action as a Saul Bellow novel.”

— Donald E. Westlake

40. “I start with the story, almost in the old campfire sense, and the story leads to both the characters, which actors should best be cast in this story, and the language. The choice of words, more than anything else, creates the feeling that the story gives off.”

— Donald E. Westlake

41. “I sat up and the room was full of a man with a gun.”

— Donald E. Westlake

42. “Well, she was dead, and there was no use crying over spilt milk.”

— Donald E. Westlake

43. “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.”

— Donald E. Westlake

44. “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.”

— Donald E. Westlake

45. “A friend of mine’ll follow him home tonight”, Tiny said, “to get me the address. He’s on the four to twelve. Around one, I’ll put on a ski mask and go to that guy’s house and put his head in his holster.” “A ski mask,” Dortmunder echoed. He was thinking how much good a ski mask would do to disguise this monster. In order to be effectively disguised, Tiny would have to put on, at a minimum, a three-room apartment.”

— Donald E. Westlake

46. “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.”

— Donald E. Westlake

47. “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.”

— Donald E. Westlake

48. “All airports make you drive in great circles to get anywhere. You can never just drive in to the airport and then turn around and drive back out again. You have to loop over and under and in and out and through and around, all on a network of roads architecturally based on the concept of the Christmas-present bow, following endless barely comprehensible signs.”

— Donald E. Westlake

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

— Donald E. Westlake