Donald E. Westlake Quotes

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

I think of myself now as a writer, although I wouldn't go as far as to say 'novelist' because that sounds like a Victorian person.

I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just because I got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non-fiction was much more interesting than I thought it was.

I was definitely meant to be a young adult author, and I love it - I'm here to stay!

I never really saw myself as writing science fiction anyway.

I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.

I tell people you should write what you love to read because that's where your passion is.

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

People do sometimes ask me some really idiotic questions: 'Is your husband afraid of you putting arsenic in his food?' I replied that I have never written a book about poison, ever.

A writer is defined by the language in which he writes, and I would stick to that definition.

I never took creative writing.

That's the secret to anything we write. You have to bring your experience to it. Otherwise, how do you expect anyone else to connect to it?

I remember selling my first short story and thinking, Oh my god, I sold something for fifty dollars! That gives me the authority to say I'm a writer and to actually write more things! It legitimized the activity.

I never actually wanted to write horror, oddly enough. It was a kind of misnomer, because I didn't ever actually write horror in the sense of the genre known for it. It was more a type of pigeon-holing in bookshops.

A writer writes what he knows, in ways that are natural to him.

Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.

Not all women write the same. But I don't understand why the model is that you're supposed to write like a man, and that means you're a real writer.

I think I'm too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know.

I'd go for "really great writer." Although I don't think I am. I know I have a style which is recognizable. I think you can see Terry Pratchett in every book. I like doing it. I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it.

When you're young, your perception of what it means to be a writer is often less about the writing and more about what seems to be the accompanying life: speeches and travel and hanging out with other writers. You think that when you get published, your life will clarify itself to you somehow. But when you don't get published until you're middle-aged you know who you are already, and your life expands to make room for your writing, rather than orbiting around it. You realize that there's no one way to be a writer, and that the job is less of an identity and more of a vocation.

I'm just writing what I know. I've never been much of a reader of fantasy, and I think you write what you, personally, enjoy reading.

My writing is of a very different kind from anything I've heard about. All this mythological material is out there, a big gathering of stuff, and I have been reading it for some forty- or fifty-odd years. There are various ways of handling that. The most common is to put the material together and publish a scholarly book about it. But when I'm writing, I try to get a sense of an experiential relationship to the material. In fact, I can't write unless that happens ... I don't write unless the stuff is really working on me, and my selection of material depends on what works.

There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem.

The spotlight was on me. I pretended it wasn't, but it was, and for every wrong reason. It was all about money, it was all about my supposed competition with Joe Eszterhas over who'd be the highest-paid screenwriter. I didn't care. I just wanted to write stories, try to become a better writer, improve my style, change genres, even try new things. I didn't like action so much any more.

The kind of poetry I write, lyric poetry, I think is really concerned with intimacy, with mystery. That needn't be religious mystery, there are mysteries to do with everyday life.