Clint Johns writes:
I’m a regular visitor to your blog, so I thought you might be interested in this link. It’s a relatively recent article (from 7/12) about Donald Westlake and his long career. For my money, the best part of it is the generous number of Westlake quotations from all sorts of places, including interviews as well as his novels. There are lots of writers who can turn a phrase, but Westlake was in a class by himself (or maybe with just a few others).
The Westlake quotes are good, but my favorite for these sorts of quotes is still George V. Higgins.
Here’s the only one I liked out of all of them:
“What did Jesus Christ say to the Teamsters? ‘Do nothing till I get back.’”
In 1980, when the NYC taxi commission raised rates, the op-ed page of the Times ran a Westlake parody of The Rodgers-Hart song “Ten Cents a Dance.” It began
Ten cents a tenth
That’s what we’ll pay you
God how we’ll weigh you down.
Ten cents a tenth
Civvies and hack guys
Black guys who live uptown. . .