Dancing Aztecs Quotes

“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.”
― Donald E. Westlake, Dancing Aztecs

“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.)”
― Donald E. Westlake, Dancing Aztecs

“(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.”
― Donald E. Westlake, Dancing Aztecs

“Probably nobody ever jogs toward the room where they will write their suicide note,”
― Donald E. Westlake, Dancing Aztecs

“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.”
― Donald E. Westlake, Dancing Aztecs

“New York is full of water, and neither looks it nor acts it. Of the five boroughs of the city, only one—the Bronx—is on the mainland of the United States, and yet you can spend months in New York without seeing any water except what comes out of the faucet.”
― Donald E. Westlake, Dancing Aztecs

“But airport security is meant mostly to impress honest citizens and insurance companies, and secondarily to catch hijackers and other crazies. There is no security against a man with his own truck and his own clipboard, and Inter-Air Forwarding was a safe, reliable financial success from the beginning.”
― Donald E. Westlake, Dancing Aztecs

“There were other ways to live. You could do something else, if you wanted. And if you had a reason.”
― Donald E. Westlake, Dancing Aztecs

“Bobbi doubted there was ever much future for a couple who had nothing in common except heterosexuality.”
― Donald E. Westlake, Dancing Aztecs

“Good God!” he said. “Are you a faculty wife?”
― Donald E. Westlake, Dancing Aztecs

“The way London carries on about the Thames you’d think it was a big deal, including lining it with all their classiest buildings, such as Parliament. San Francisco, the wind-up toy of cities, never gets over its Bay, and Venice is so much in love with its Bay that it’s sinking into it. New York is full”
― Donald E. Westlake, Dancing Aztecs

“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.”
― Donald E. Westlake, Dancing Aztecs

“now he was requesting as much microfilm as the librarians would let him have at one time, and was buzzing it all through the viewer with such speed that the machine was actually rocking on the table. (Several other researchers, with the frowns of elephants disturbed at their feeding, had gathered up their own materials and moved”
― Donald E. Westlake, Dancing Aztecs

“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.”
― Donald E. Westlake, Dancing Aztecs

“Los Angeles isn’t a tank town.” “The hell it isn’t. Los Angeles is three Long Islands next to each other. But no Midtown Tunnel.”
― Donald E. Westlake, Dancing Aztecs

“Or, maybe it would be better to slam seven or eight elevated superhighways across the island, knocking down everything in the way, like Robert Moses wanted.”
― Donald E. Westlake, Dancing Aztecs

“The story of New York is speed, is movement, movement without stopping, on the go all the time, gotta hustle,”
― Donald E. Westlake, Dancing Aztecs