Lawrence Block Quotes

Forgiving himself came easy to him. His, he'd come to realize, was a forgiving nature.

As my late mother famously observed, the one thing to be said for growing old is that every year there are a few more things I don't have to give a rat's ass about.

I can't persuade myself that one of the problems facing the planet today might be a shortage of books by me.

Take care. It seems to me that people have only been saying that phrase on parting for the past few years or so. All of a sudden everyone started to say it, as if the whole country abruptly recognized that ours is a world which demands caution.

When writing functions in this fashion as self-directed psychotherapy, we err if we demand that people be entertained and enlightened by the process.

The New Your energy goes beyond anything you'll find anywhere else. It's too much for some people and it grinds them down, but it lifts up and animates the rest of us.

I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.

I've always essentially been a New Yorker.

This church was open and seemingly unattended, and it was a throwback in another way as well. The candles in the little side altars were real ones, actual wax candles that burned with an open flame. Lots of churches have switched over to electrified altars. You drop your quarter in the slot and a flame-shaped bulb goes on and stays on for your quarter's worth of time. It's like a parking meter, and if you stay too long they tow away your soul.

I thought, My name is Matt and I'm an alcoholic. A woman I know got killed last night. She hired me to keep her from getting killed and I wound up assuring her that she was safe and she believed me. And her killer conned me and I believed him, and she's dead now, and there's nothing I can do about it. And it eats at me and I don't know what to do about that, and there's a bar on every corner and a liquor store on every block, and drinking won't bring her back to life but neither will staying sober, and why the hell do I have to go through this? Why?

Stories are like assholes. Everybody's got one and most of 'em stink.

Many of us may not know too much about our characters, but we tell the reader altogether too much.

Back then, before it became clear that democracy was best served by a drunken electorate, the bars in New York City were required to close on Election Day.

all six of them a license." "That

I dialed it now, and the machine picked up. I listened to a dead man's voice. I hung up, wondering how long it would be before someone unplugged the machine, how long before the telephone company cut off the phone service.
You don't die all at once. Not anymore. These days you die a little at a time.

I find him whelming, personally. Neither overwhelming nor underwhelming but somewhere in the middle.

I think persistence in the face of adversity is an essential part of a writer's job description. If you don't care enough about it to avoid being easily disheartened that way, you really should be doing something else.

One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have to be looking for something in order to find something else.

A treat indeed, to read Raymond Chandler for the first time. I almost envied the man,

Being broke is not a crime, nor is it proof of one's inadequacy as a writer or as a human being. If you go around with an attitude of implicit apology for being temporarily without funds, it's going to do you more harm than good.

I try to avoid eating endangered species, let alone mythical ones. You

Ideas come to people who are receptive to them.

She made love with the freshness of an impatient virgin and the ingenuity of a sex-scarred whore.

If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.

Booze and tobacco and lots of sex. It keeps a lad young.

Is that what I am? I don't know what the hell I am anymore."
"Oh, bullshit. You're a guy, a human being. Just another poor son of a bitch who doesn't want to be alone when the sacred ginmill closes.

Faith and fear, they tell me, can't coexist. I try to practice by doing what I'm afraid to do, and I manage (now and then, anyway) by means of faith. Faith that I will do myself more good than harm by the risks I am willing to take as a writer. And faith, finally, that the best service I can do myself is to do the best and most honest work of which I am capable.

I wouldn't presume to define noir - if we could define it, we wouldn't need to use a French word for it - but it seems to me it's more a way of looking at the world than what one sees.

I haven't seen her in five years. Well, hell, I haven't had a cigarette in twelve, and I damn well wanted one for a minute there. Sometimes I don't think anybody ever gets over anything.

Imaginative persons could probably find interesting things to do with handcuffs and a nightstick.

Man, I so sick of dinosaurs. They wasn't extinct, I'd go out an' kill 'em myself.

Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.

I rode to the fourth floor, poked around until I found the stairway, and walked down a flight. I almost always do this and I sometimes wonder why. I think someone must have done it in a movie once and I was evidently impressed, but it's really a waste of time, especially when the elevator in question is self-service.

Serendipity. Look for something, find something else, and realize that what you've found is more suited to your needs than what you thought you were looking for.

So many changes, eating away at the world like water dripping on a rock.

Fuck you! I hope you die!"
"Everybody Dies," I said. "So fuck you.

Fiction writing starts off by requiring the towering arrogance that enables one to sit down at the typewriter in the belief that someone somewhere will actually be eager to read the productions of our own private imaginations. But that arrogance must be buffered by the humility that leads us to learn our craft and strive to make our work comprehensible and inviting and accessible to the reader.

Forcible sodomy and illegal entry, you put them both down and you get a jury confused. They figure it's two ways of saying the same thing.

There are eight million stories in the naked city," he intoned. "You remember that program? Used to be on television some years back."
"I remember."
"They had that line at the end of every show. 'There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.' "
"I remember it."
"Eight million stories," he said. "You know what you got in this city, this fucked-up toilet of a naked fucking city? You know what you got? You got eight million ways to die.

Cain said he wasn't Abel's keeper. Are those our only choices, keeper or killer?

You know, it was a revelation to me to learn that I don't have to be comfortable. Nowhere is it written that I must be comfortable. I always thought if I felt nervous or anxious or unhappy I had to do something about it. But I learned that's not true. Bad feelings won't kill me. Alcohol will kill me, but my feelings won't.

I wanted a drink. There were a hundred reasons why a man will want a drink, but I wanted one now for the most elementary reason of all. I didn't want to feel what I was feeling, and a voice within was telling me that I needed a drink, that I couldn't bear it without it.
But that voice is a liar. You can always bear the pain. It'll hurt, it'll burn like acid in an open wound, but you can stand it. And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.

Come on in," Elaine said. "She's already here. Pam, this is Mr. Scudder, Matthew Scudder. Matt, I'd like you to meet Pam.

I don't plan an awful lot in life just as I don't plan an awful lot in my fiction.

Life, I announced, is not a B picture. Well, it ain't no De Mille epic either, boss. Things'll work out, Bernie.

I really don't write much anymore, and I'm not uncomfortable with that. I've tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don't want to go on.

Asking me why I did or didn't do anything is generally pointless. How do I know? And asking me what I'll do in the future is even less rewarding.

You got to ask a street question to get a street answer.

We turned out to be good for each other. For a stitch of time all the hard questions went away and hid in dark places.

- And I won't deny your neighbors will take you more seriously if you tell them you've written a novel. (Of course if that's the main concern, just go and tell them. You don't have to write anything. Just lie a little. Don't worry - they won't beg to read the manuscript.)

As my grandmother used to say, if you've got nothing good to say about someone, let's hear it.

I thought I'd go home and reread Sue Grafton. It's been a while since I last read the one about the topless dancer who gets poison injected into one of her implants."
"'D' Is For Cup."
"Right. Bern, you know what I wish? I wish she didn't have to stop at twenty-six. When the alphabet's used up, what happens to Kinsey?"
"Are you kidding? She goes straight into doublé letters. 'AA' Is For drunks, 'BB' Is For Gun, 'CC' Is For Rider. There was a whole list in Publishers Weekly a few months back. 'PP' Is For Golden Showers, 'ZZ' Is For Topp- I can't remember them all, but it looks as though she can go on forever."
"Bern, that's wonderful news."
"You'll be reading about Kinsey fifty years from now," I told her. "'AAA' Is for Motorists, 'MMM' Is for Scotch Tape. You'll never have to stop.

Everybody tells me what a timesaver the Internet is, and how they can't believe they ever got along without it. And I know what they mean, but every time I use it I wind up wondering what people did with their spare time before computers came along to suck it all up.

It's enough of a strain killing people. I've no time for deer.
Mick Ballou

Being dead means never having to do anything sneaky.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one ...

Novels are written - as life is lived - One Day At A Time.

Life, I'd heard someone say, is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. It seemed to me that it was both at once, even for those of us who don't do much of either.

I stood for a moment, letting my ears do the walking, and then I gave the bell a thorough ring and waited thirty thoughtful seconds before ringing it again.
And that, let me assure you, is not a waste of time. Public institutions throughout the fifty states provide food and clothing and shelter for lads who don't ring the bell first.

He's got a new BMW now, thanks to the Galaxy. He can't spell it, but he can drive it like crazy.

Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you'll want on that desert island.

WHEN you hit a gay bar in the middle of a weekday afternoon you wonder why they don't call it something else.

If fate sends you a lemon, use it to make lemonade.

Sometimes it's a dog-eat-dog world and the rest of the time it's the other way around.

Martin Greer Galton had ceased troubling his fellow man in 1964, when a cerebral aneurysm achieved what most of his acquaintances and business associates would have dearly loved to have had a hand in.

People go through changes and life does the damnedest things to us all.

You know what I realized?" "What?" "Most of the people I know are dead. I guess that happens

You think he just died of natural causes?"
"This is New York. Murder's a natural cause in this city.

What time is it?"
"Time?"
"Time."
"Oh," She said. "A quarter to four. Mr. Markham, something terrible has happened."
She didn't have to tell me that. Something perfectly dreadful had happened, by God. Someone had called me in the middle of the bloody night.

"Time?"
"Time."
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"Time."
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I looked down into my glass. It held club soda, but the way I was gazing into it you'd have thought it was filled with something stronger. I used to stare like that into glasses of whiskey, as if they contained coded answers. All they did was dissolve the questions, but there was a time when that was enough.

Every year there's a few more things I'm not sure of. I've decided that a wide-ranging uncertainty is the mark of the true maturity of man.

I haven't got anything against cats. I haven't got anything against elk either, but that doesn't mean I'm going to keep one in the store so I'll have a place to hang my hat.

When someone put money in your hand you closed your fingers around it and put it in your pocket.

We're all whirling merrily through the void on a dying planet, and gay people are just doing their usual number, being shamelessly trendy as always. Right out in front on the cutting edge of death.