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"Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every page he ever wrote."
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Exlpore more Appearance quotes

"She has enough black eyeliner on to outline a corpse, and her skin's so pale she looks like she's just broken dawn."

"Himself an ugly man, insignificantof appearance, he prized very highly comeliness in others."

"Her face is silting up, like a pond; layers are accumulating. Every once in a while, when she can afford the time, she spends a few days at a spa north of the city, drinking vegetable juice and having ultrasound treatments, in search of her original face, the one she knows is under there somewhere; she comes back feeling toned up and virtuous, and hungry."

"Intelligence, goodness, humanity, excitement, serenity. Over time, these are the things that change the musculature of your face, as do laughter, and animation, and especially whatever peace you can broker with the person inside.It's furrow, pinch, and judgement that make us look older - our mothers were right. They said that if you made certain faces, they would stick, and they do. But our mothers forgot that faces of kindness and integrity stick as well."

"Though Queen Victoria in England had suggested that makeup was impolite, even vanity, Gideon saw it as yet another weapon. It was not so different from magic."

"There was a photograph of Trout. He was an old man with a full black beard. He looked like a frightened, aging Jesus, whose sentence to crucifixion had been commuted to imprisonment for life."

"For outward show is a wonderful perverter of the reason."

"The curve of my waist in a tight fitting summer dress can really make me new friends."

"Most of us don't notice how great we look until years, even decades later. Not long ago, I was looking at photos of myself at various ages and weights-way before the neckular deterioration began, way before the fanny pack of menopause-and I could see how gorgeous I must have looked to everyone else."

"All the men's clothes she wore just called attention to how much of a girl she was."
Explore more quotes by Donald E. Westlake

"Once he became a series character, I made the conscious choice that he would never act like a series character, never wink at the reader, never pull his punches. Better for him, better for me."

"I also wanted Parker to operate in the Internet age without losing being Parker. He's always operated in the world without really being with the world, and cyberspace means that the rest of us are more and more living the same way."

"When Stark isn't off sulking somewhere, or whatever he's doing when he won't return my calls, I alternate between the two. That usually works well, though occasionally an idea for the wrong guy drifts through my mind."

"All of the changes in publishing since 1960 are significant. There are far fewer publishers."

"The many magazines, ranging from pulp to slick, that used to serve as both farm teams for writers and lures to readers, with hundreds of short stories every month, don't exist. Most of the doors for new people have been sealed."

"My work schedule has changed over the years. The one constant is, when at work on a novel, I try to work seven days a week, so as not to lose touch with that world. Within that, I'm flexible on hours and output."

"Nothing about it interested me. Or about anything else, except making up stories. If literacy weren't so nearly universal, God knows what I'd be. A drain on the State, I shouldn't wonder."

"If it weren't for received ideas, the publishing industry wouldn't have any ideas at all."

"If you think of movie studio executives, say, as society, then I root for the independent producers."
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