Life & Wisdom Quote by Donald E. Westlake

New York, in Westlake's hands, isn’t a skyline; it’s a perpetual search engine with legs. “Everybody…is looking for something” lands less like a romantic observation than a hardboiled operating system: the city runs on hunger. Not just for money or fame, but for angles, exits, scores, reinvention. Westlake, a master of crime fiction and comic misdirection, knows that desire is the one resource the city never runs out of, and it makes everyone simultaneously a striver and a mark.

The sly turn is the second sentence. “Once in a while, somebody finds it” carries the dry, almost bureaucratic pessimism of a writer who understands probability. The promise of New York is that the search pays off; Westlake rewires that promise into a statistical fluke. The line is funny because it refuses the expected uplift. It’s also bleak because it implies that most people don’t just fail; they keep moving anyway, fueled by the myth that finding is common.

Subtextually, “it” is a deliberately blank object: meaning, love, a deal, a missing person, a clean getaway, a self. That vagueness is the point. In Westlake’s world, everyone’s pursuit overlaps in the same crowded streets, and collision is inevitable. The city becomes a narrative machine: millions of private quests, a few accidental winners, and a lot of near-misses that look, from the outside, like ambition.