It was Dortmunder’s belief that in every trade with glamor attached to it – burglary, say, or politics, movies, piloting airplanes – there were the people who actually did the job and were professional about it, and then there were the people on the fringe who were too interested in the glamor and not enough interested in the job, and those were the people who loused it up for everybody else.
More from Westlake’s Nobody’s Perfect. See also: writing.