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778024b
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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.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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6488843
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Hispanics have a long tradition of defiance against authority. Come to that, the Irish and Italians and Jews also have a long tradition of defiance against authority. Thinking it over, everybody has a long tradition of defiance against authority. (Except the Germans, of course.)
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Donald E. Westlake |
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339b361
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It was apparent...that, all over America, thousands of people threw down a book or got up from a television show and said, 'I can write better than that!' It was amazing how many of them were wrong.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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a7846f1
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A lady doctor in the foreground, black horn-rims and white lab coat, suddenly cried, "You people ought to be ashamed of yourselves! Do you realize what you're doing to the reality concepts we're trying to instill in these people? How do you expect them to differentiate between illusion and reality when you do something like ?""
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Donald E. Westlake |
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8631a5c
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Two solid weeks of beautiful weather. Clear sunny days, low humidity, temperature in the seventies, air so brisk and clean you could read E PLURIBUS UNUM on a dime across the street. Clear cloudless nights, temperature in the fifties, the sky a great soft raven's breast, an immense bowl of octopus ink salted with a million hard white crystalline stars and garnished with a huge moon pulsing with white light. It was disgusting.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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24b7d7c
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Story ideas had never been a problem for him, there'd always been more ideas than time to write them, he'd reject one perfectly good notion because he fell more simpatico toward a different one. But of course he could never go back to any of those ancient story stubs, they wouldn't still have juice in them. For him, creating a novel was like gardening; you choose your seed, you treat it exactly the way the package says, and gradually a thin..
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Donald E. Westlake |
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b73fa4e
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Novelists, when their characters drive cars, never feel compelled to describe precisely what the physical actions are of hands, feet, eyes, knees, elbows. Yet many of these same novelists, when their characters copulate, get into such detailed physical description you'd think they were writing an exercise book. We all know the interrelation between the right ankle and the accelerator when driving a car, and we needn't be told.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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4c8a8b6
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Zachary's partner, a younger man with a moustache named Freedly-- Well, no. The man was named Freedly. Zachary's partner, a younger man named Freedly with a moustache-- Zachary's partner, a moustached younger man named Freedly-- Freedly said, "Have you got the ring on you?"
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Donald E. Westlake |
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36b14e3
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That's a geometric figure, that bird, he don't exist without an angle.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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8953af4
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huddled together at the left end of the bar, as silent and miserable as kittens in a sack with the bridge getting close.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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7de6261
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had been happy to play the part of a Bronte heroine if it meant she wouldn't have to learn how to cook.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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c7e2e0f
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May knew John had a very bad tendency, when things got unusually difficult, to sink with an almost sensuous pleasure into a warm bath of despair. Once you've handed the reins over to despair, to mix a metaphor just a teeny bit, your job is done. You don't have to sweat it any more, you've taken yourself out of the game. Despair is the bench, and you are warming it.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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2e09e51
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You wanna know what's happening to New York?" he asked. "I tell you what you do. You go to a used-magazine store, you look at the covers of science fiction magazines from the thirties. That's what's happening to New York."
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Donald E. Westlake |
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e9e230a
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They turned and found themselves facing a bullet head on an ICBM body lumpily stuffed into a black shirt and a brown suit. It was as though King Kong were making a break for it, hoping to smuggle himself back to his island disguised as a human being.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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8a32453
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However, inflation and unemployment have affected the shopping centers at least as much as the rest of the economy, so that here and there among the brave enticements stood a storefront dark, silent, its windows black, its forehead nameless, its prospects bleak. The survivors seemed to beam the more brightly in their efforts to distract attention from their fallen comrades, but Dortmunder could see them. Dortmunder and a failed enterprise c..
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Donald E. Westlake |
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a38697b
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an old Underwood office machine so big and black and ancient it looked as though it should come with a foreign correspondent attached.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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468b338
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Dortmunder followed Kelp as he carried the tray down along the bar past the regulars, where the third was now saying, "The idea of the flat tax is, you just pay the same as one month's rent."
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Donald E. Westlake |
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30a4a11
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I sat up and the room was full of a man with a gun.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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561a420
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Well, you might not think it to look at me," Dortmunder told him, "but I got a family crest." "Have you?" "Yeah. And it's got a motto on it." "I am anxious to hear this motto." "Quid lucrum istic mihi est." Mr. Hemlow squinted; the red-headed hawk in flight. "I'm afraid my Latin is insufficient for that." "What's in it for me," Dortmunder translated." --
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Donald E. Westlake |
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6a18df8
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telling the jokes--was the setups. Why were that priest, that rabbi, and that minister walking down that street? Where were they headed? How had they happened to come together? What odd chance had put ex-presidents Bush, Clinton, and Carter on that same plane?
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Donald E. Westlake |
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cf5dfef
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If buyer's remorse ever accomplished anything in this world," Max said, "we'd all still be living in caves."
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Donald E. Westlake |
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fdf9e9b
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Dortmunder had helped by expressing doubts. "If the Puerto Ricans all come here," he'd said, for instance, "how come it's such a hot idea for us to go there?" Another time, he'd expressed the opinion that airplanes were too heavy to fly, and a little later he'd pointed out he didn't have a passport. "You don't need a passport," May told him. "Puerto Rico's part of the US." He stared at her. "The hell it is." But it turned out she was right ..
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Donald E. Westlake |
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87b15a0
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wish you would." "Right. When I had the emerald again, I was in a cell. I guess they were afraid the rest of the guys might try to spring me right away, 'cause they hid me out in a precinct on the Upper West Side for the first"
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Donald E. Westlake |
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4eb1f57
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a whole lot of ideas isn't a plan. A plan is a bunch of details that mesh with one another, so you go from this step to this step like crossing a stream on a lot of little boulders sticking out, and never fall in. Ideas without a plan is usually just enough boulders to get you into the deep part of the stream, and no way to get back.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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e100e2d
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since dispassionate self-knowledge is not a quality held in much esteem by the majority of the human race,
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Donald E. Westlake |
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7dd3a70
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Dortmunder and the Major strolled away down the long corridor overlooking customs, with the duty-free shops on one side of the corridor and on the other side the railing where people can stand and look down at their returning relatives and visiting foreign friends being degraded.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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9c262f7
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understood that in the business environment it was considered a gesture of civilization to offer the guest something to drink without booze in it, and probably a hostile act to refuse it, so he said, "Seltzer, yeah, sounds good."
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Donald E. Westlake |
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9851fa4
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Mr. Dortmunder, this is too good a story to just jump in and tell the end." Dortmunder hated stories that were that good, but"
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Donald E. Westlake |
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00d6fec
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I Googled it all." Dortmunder had heard of this; some other nosey parker way to mind everybody else's business."
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Donald E. Westlake |
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0d1088c
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At the moment, the discussion concerned global warming. "The reason for global warming," one of them said as Dortmunder leaned his front against the bar somewhere down to the right of them, "is air conditioners."
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Donald E. Westlake |
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84216da
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Like the residents of Brigadoon, the people in the church drifted in a long and dreamless sleep, freed of struggle and expectation.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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ca2889c
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In the cab going downtown, Doug believed he now understood the sensations felt by a person slowly sinking into the grasp of an octopus. Play dead, he told himself. But how?
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Donald E. Westlake |
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712039a
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Real life. The greatest interactive fiction of them all.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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6dc6b03
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There are no Territories to light out for, not in this century. It was no longer easy to become the new you. New or old, you were already you.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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ec03b56
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Two days in a row with morning appointments! What kind of evil cloud was he under here, all of a sudden?
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Donald E. Westlake |
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3944c59
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found himself marveling at how many different names there are in this world. All individual, most pronounceable. Think of that.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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c5108bd
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Since he'd been born rich into a family that had been a long time rich, he'd never known the need to suppress his feelings, so he pouted completely and might even have stamped his foot again, except he sensed that a kind of lumpish stillness might better illustrate the sulk he'd fallen into.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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506871d
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Since the conversation had deteriorated to a loop, Dortmunder abandoned it and looked out his window instead at the thin sunlight out there, until Murch's Mom made the right turn onto Eighth Avenue and sank contentedly into the perpetual blockage there, a traffic snarl well into its second century, running--or not running--from below Penn Station up to above the Port Authority bus terminal.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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7b83eae
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That was the annoying thing about the kid, who was otherwise okay. Every once in a while, he'd get it before anybody else got it, and when he got it, he got it. So Tiny said to him, "If you got it, give it to us."
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Donald E. Westlake |
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3939271
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Apart from the scenic majesty of the mountainous countryside, unspoiled by modern, conveniences, there is also the small but vibrant capital city of Quetchyl (pronounced "Clutch"), with its many squares and plazas, each with its magnificent statue of President Malagua, sometimes astride a horse and sometimes not astride a horse." --
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Donald E. Westlake |
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9c8f470
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The office containing these two men was of such hushed opulence that it seemed as though their words were borne to one another on small plush pillows.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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ec8ae9e
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Good God!" he said. "Are you a faculty wife?"
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Donald E. Westlake |
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5fb6205
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But other things had added to Jerry's present weird mood, his new view of himself as someone who'd suddenly found he was in a six-foot-deep rut when all along he'd thought of himself as sailing.
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Donald E. Westlake |
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f4639f0
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Why, Wally," he said. "Except for leaving out the part where Tom continues to be a homicidal maniac, it's all the truth."
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Donald E. Westlake |