"If it weren't for received ideas, the publishing industry wouldn't have any ideas at all"
About this Quote
A perfectly sharpened insult disguised as a shrug, Westlake's line skewers publishing by praising the one thing it can always be counted on to produce: convention. "Received ideas" is doing double duty here. It means inherited wisdom - what the culture has already agreed is "good", "important", "marketable" - and it also implies the industry literally receives ideas, pre-sorted and pre-approved, rather than generating them. The joke lands because it's built like a paradox: take away the industry's dependence on old notions and it has nothing left, not even the capacity for novelty it pretends to curate.
Westlake was a working novelist who understood the machinery from the inside: editors who love risk in theory, marketing departments who hate it in spreadsheets, acquisition meetings where "comp titles" stand in for imagination. The subtext isn't just that publishers are conservative; it's that the entire ecosystem rewards familiarity while selling itself as the engine of culture. "Any ideas at all" has the bite of someone who's watched originality get reframed as a liability and craft get mistaken for "not a fit for our list."
The line also reads as a defensive manifesto from a genre writer who saw how prestige gatekeeping works. Received ideas are what allow the industry to anoint certain stories as Literature and demote others as product - even when both are equally manufactured. Westlake isn't anti-intellectual; he's anti-piety. He's saying the business that claims to traffic in new thought often survives by laundering old thought through fresh cover art.
Westlake was a working novelist who understood the machinery from the inside: editors who love risk in theory, marketing departments who hate it in spreadsheets, acquisition meetings where "comp titles" stand in for imagination. The subtext isn't just that publishers are conservative; it's that the entire ecosystem rewards familiarity while selling itself as the engine of culture. "Any ideas at all" has the bite of someone who's watched originality get reframed as a liability and craft get mistaken for "not a fit for our list."
The line also reads as a defensive manifesto from a genre writer who saw how prestige gatekeeping works. Received ideas are what allow the industry to anoint certain stories as Literature and demote others as product - even when both are equally manufactured. Westlake isn't anti-intellectual; he's anti-piety. He's saying the business that claims to traffic in new thought often survives by laundering old thought through fresh cover art.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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