Donald E. Westlake Quotes

For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.

A lot of people get really stuck in this idea that everything's been done and there's nowhere left to go.

I don't ever want to do anything that's obvious, and I also want to find ways to do things that are extremely new and exciting and can make sense in bizarre ways. I always want things to make sense in really bizarre ways.

To the creative individual all experience is seminal-all events are equidistant from new ideasand insights.

Whenever people ask where I get my sick and twisted ideas from, I reply, 'Just open your eyes.'

I wouldn't know how to think inside the box because I don't even know where it is. I wouldn't know how to do it any other way.

Scientists who play by someone else's rules don't have much chance of making discoveries.

We travellers are in very hard circumstances. If we say nothing but what has been said before us, we are dull and have observed nothing. If we tell anything new, we are laughed at as fabulous and romantic.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

A 'new thinker', when studied closely, is merely a man who does not know what other people have thought.

What worse illness can there be than acute conventionality. You should pray every night that you don't wake up with it.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity.

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

In a country as united as ours [Russia], it is quite inevitable that a certain amount of thinking in clichés should appear, and I want to overcome this standardized way of thinking and introduce into our literature new ideas, new feeling and rhythms.

The people who do make big discoveries are the ones who somehow manage to free themselves from conventional ways of thinking and to see the subject from a new perspective.

A genius is someone with the ability to come up with ideas that are new, surprising and valuable.

Never judge something by whether it is popular or not. You don't have to follow trends. No one thought William Wilberforce was right at first.

I like to say it's an attitude of not just thinking outside the box, but not even seeing the box.

We need innovation and creativity.

My imagination is so far out there already. People couldn't imagine what goes on in my brain.

I've always been a bit of an inventor, just making up weird things people haven't thought of before. I can't tell you exactly what, though, because they might actually happen one day!

I think if you're really good at what you do, you can see outside the box.

I think it's been obvious from the beginning that my projects are not going to be something that people already have in mind. You can't be thinking about such things when you create something.

I always imagine, and try to be on the lookout, for new things, for references that can inspire me creatively so I can showcase things that people haven't done before or that are new.