I've always essentially been a New Yorker.

Every year there's a few more things I'm not sure of. I've decided that a wide-ranging uncertainty is the mark of the true maturity of man.

If fate sends you a lemon, use it to make lemonade.

I wouldn't presume to define noir - if we could define it, we wouldn't need to use a French word for it - but it seems to me it's more a way of looking at the world than what one sees.

Man, I so sick of dinosaurs. They wasn't extinct, I'd go out an' kill 'em myself.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one.

Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you'll want on that desert island.