Life & Wisdom Quote by Donald E. Westlake

Work, in Westlake's telling, is less a noble calling than a caper you keep trying to pull off against the cops of everyday life. "I loved it" plants a sincere stake in the ground: writing isn't drudgery, it's appetite. Then comes the snag, delivered with a dry shrug: "social reality impeded". He doesn't say poverty or deadlines or children or rent; he uses a broad, bureaucratic phrase that makes the obstacle sound like a municipal ordinance. That's the joke, and it's also the truth. The world intrudes not with melodrama but with scheduling.

The self-portrait that follows is slyly double-edged. The routine - 9 a.m., back in the afternoon - reads like a compromise between bohemian myth and payroll respectability, a workday staged to look normal while preserving the writer's private chaos. Calling himself "a very lenient boss" is a neat split-screen: Westlake as both labor and management, exploiting and indulging the same employee. It's comedy, but it's also a real accounting of creative life: you negotiate with your own resistance, you grant yourself sick days, you play tough and then fold.

In context, this sounds like Westlake the crime novelist smuggling craft advice in the form of a wisecrack. The intent isn't to glamorize genius; it's to normalize inconsistency, to admit that discipline is necessary but cannot be pure. The subtext is almost political: the romantic idea of the writer collapses under "social reality", so you build a small, forgiving bureaucracy of your own and hope the pages still get written.