If your best friend has stolen your girlfriend, it does become life and death.
The only discipline that lasts is self-discipline.
I done drew the line. Just like the Alamo. You're either on one side of the line or the other. I don't want to ever leave Texas again.
Respect all. Fear none.
I don't need the news. If they have a war, I figure someone will tell me.
Yep. And I noticed how slowly he went down each time, too. (When asked if he noticed how slowly Earl Campbell got up after each play. )
The road to the Super Bowl runs through Pittsburgh, sooner or later you've got to go to Pittsburgh.
My job as an artist, as I see it, is to understand and in some cases to take on various ways of thinking about people and the world that are different from my own, sometimes radically different.
I always tell people I want to live to be 150 and they say why would you want to do that. I say, well there's a few people I haven't made mad yet, I want to get them.
I'd seen people overstay their welcome and I didn't want that to happen at all.
I wouldn't care to speculate about what it is in Westlake's psyche that makes him so good at writing about Parker, much less what it is that makes me like the Parker novels so much. Suffice it to say that StarkWestlake is the cleanest of all noir novelists, a styleless stylist who gets to the point with stupendous economy, hustling you down the path of plot so briskly that you have to read his books a second time to appreciate the elegance and sober wit with which they are written.