Faith & Spirit Quote by Donald E. Westlake

Beneath the deadpan shrug is a confession with teeth: a writer admitting that his one usable appetite is invention, and that everything else in the “productive citizen” toolkit feels optional at best. Westlake’s humor works because it refuses the usual romance of authorship. No talk of destiny, no sacred calling. Just a narrow obsession - “making up stories” - framed less as gift than as the only habit that kept him employable.

The line about literacy being “so nearly universal” is doing double duty. It’s gratitude, yes, but delivered as a sideways insult to any society that pretends talent alone explains success. Westlake points out the infrastructure beneath the myth: public schooling, cheap paperbacks, libraries, a reading public big enough to feed a midlist career. He’s not claiming genius; he’s acknowledging a system that makes his particular neurosis marketable.

“God knows what I’d be” lands like faux-piety, then swivels into class anxiety: “a drain on the State.” That’s Westlake’s sly self-portrait as the kid who might have slipped through the cracks if words weren’t an available ladder. It also undercuts the macho individualism baked into American success stories. The subtext is blunt: without mass literacy, a lot of “self-made” lives would look like unemployment statistics.

Coming from a prolific crime novelist and comic stylist, the remark fits his broader sensibility: respect the craft, distrust the mythology, and never miss a chance to puncture your own legend before someone else inflates it.