Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I have no known marketable skills.
Who's a boy gonna talk to if not his mother?
Sorry; I have no space left for advice. Just do it.
The trouble with real life is, there's no reset button.
When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.
Eyes wide and blank as the buttons on a first Communion coat.
My mother believed in all superstitions, plus she made some up.
In order to hold your faith intact be sure it's kept unsullied by fact.
What did Jesus Christ say to the Teamsters? 'Do nothing till I get back.
Whenever things sound easy, it turns out there's one part you didn't hear.
Everybody in New York is looking for something. Once in a while, somebody finds it.
If it weren't for received ideas, the publishing industry wouldn't have any ideas at all.
If Chester had a failing, it was that he believed people were what they thought they were.
In a funny way, the stories keep themselves alive by emerging from one another. I like that.
All of the changes in publishing since 1960 are significant. There are far fewer publishers.
I make a note, set it aside, and hope it makes sense when the time comes to look at it again.
If you think of movie studio executives, say, as society, then I root for the independent producers.
Hoke Moseley is a magnificently battered hero. Willeford brings him to us lean and hard and brand-new.
When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away.
Westlake is allusive, indirect, referential, a bit rococo, Stark strips his sentences down to the necessary information.
With writing, I prefer the solo effort, but when a team is working right, as it did on 'The Grifters,' boy, it's exhilarating.
The tortured similes, the brooding introspection, the jaundiced view of society - nobody ever has any fun in a Ross Macdonald book.
Christmas shows us the ties that bind us together, threads of love and caring, woven in the simplest and strongest way within the family.
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.
I do bookstore signings, and it seems to me that I get a variety of men and women, more women than I'd expect, and grown-ups among my readers.
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.
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.
The only thing I learned from the architecture is keep the bathroom and the kitchen near each other, so you don't have to run pipes all over the place.
Writing is flat, so if you only have part of one eye working, you still can do the job. It's just that you sit there and you're angry, which doesn't help.
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.
The thing that I prefer, when I'm working on a book, is to do a seven-day week, because it's easy to lose some of the details of what you're doing along the way.
It's so difficult, particularly with an antisocial character. It's much easier if he's already a blank page, but once you've written on him, it's hard to keep him that stripped down.
I started writing when I was 11. In my late teens, I was writing short stories of every conceivable type and sent them to everything from 'Future Science Fiction' to 'The Sewanee Review.'
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.
What advice I would give to anybody about anything. Life is a slow-motion avalanche, and none of us are steering." (When asked in an interview about what question he's tired of being asked.)
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.
A guy named Peter Rabe wrote a batch of books for Gold Medal in the '50s, and he was absolutely the single largest influence on writing style. I was completely in love with the way the man wrote.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 don't think I ever have trouble with writer's block. It's different when you make it up as you go - that means you're going to get stuck. I wouldn't call it writer's block, I'd say, "I don't know where the hell this story is going."
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.'
My wife says in Richard Stark's world, the honest citizens are goofy. Okay, they are. I don't know if it's good or bad, but because he's outside his own world, it sort of freed up the environment around him to be a little more looser and goofier.
A grifter's got an irresistible urge to be the guy who's wise. There's nothin' to whipping a fool. Hell, fools are made to be whipped. But to take another pro. Even your partner, who knows you and has his eye on you. That's a score! No matter what happens.
The critics didn't like it at all. They felt it was crude and violent without meaning, and they dumped on it. 'Point Blank' marked a shift in movie-making, and they weren't ready for it. However, I think those were the last negative words ever said about it.
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.