Top 85 Lawrence Block Quotes
#1. Well, you live and you learn, and generally in that order. I
Lawrence Block
#2. Cain said he wasn't Abel's keeper. Are those our only choices, keeper or killer?
Lawrence Block
#3. WHEN you hit a gay bar in the middle of a weekday afternoon you wonder why they don't call it something else.
Lawrence Block
#4. 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.
Lawrence Block
#5. 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.
Lawrence Block
#6. 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.
Lawrence Block
#7. There is no better way to learn how to write than by writing a novel.
Lawrence Block
#8. Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.
Lawrence Block
#9. I settled for a cup of coffee. Only it wasn't coffee. It was a coffee substitute made by grinding up dandelion roots. The idea was that it wouldn't keep you awake, and it's always seemed to me that the only thing coffee really has going for it is that it will keep you awake.
Lawrence Block
#10. 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.
Lawrence Block
#11. It's enough of a strain killing people. I've no time for deer.
Mick Ballou
Lawrence Block
#12. 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.
Lawrence Block
#13. People don't get to change things. Things change people once in a while, but people don't change things.
Lawrence Block
#14. 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.
Lawrence Block
#15. I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.
Lawrence Block
#16. Fuck you! I hope you die!"
"Everybody Dies," I said. "So fuck you.
Lawrence Block
#17. She made love with the freshness of an impatient virgin and the ingenuity of a sex-scarred whore.
Lawrence Block
#19. Booze and tobacco and lots of sex. It keeps a lad young.
Lawrence Block
#20. I find him whelming, personally. Neither overwhelming nor underwhelming but somewhere in the middle.
Lawrence Block
#21. If you cannot stand a spoon upright in the cup, then the coffee is too weak.
Lawrence Block
#22. 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.
Lawrence Block
#23. You got to ask a street question to get a street answer.
Lawrence Block
#24. Dangerous thing, giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil. And the capacity to make the wrong choice more often than not.
Lawrence Block
#26. He was always inclined to be a moody man, very exuberant when things were going right, very depressed when they weren't.
Lawrence Block
#27. Everybody's weird, fundamentally everybody is a snap. Sometimes it's a sexual thing and sometimes it's a different kind of weirdness, but one way or another everybody's nuts.
Lawrence Block
#28. Forgiving himself came easy to him. His, he'd come to realize, was a forgiving nature.
Lawrence Block
#29. It was still there, a low-grade fever in the blood, an itch somewhere down beneath the skin, where you couldn't scratch it.
Lawrence Block
#31. Many of us may not know too much about our characters, but we tell the reader altogether too much.
Lawrence Block
#32. 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.
Lawrence Block
#33. A treat indeed, to read Raymond Chandler for the first time. I almost envied the man,
Lawrence Block
#34. Sometimes it's a dog-eat-dog world and the rest of the time it's the other way around.
Lawrence Block
#35. 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.
Lawrence Block
#36. If fate sends you a lemon, use it to make lemonade.
Lawrence Block
#37. 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.
Lawrence Block
#38. I can't persuade myself that one of the problems facing the planet today might be a shortage of books by me.
Lawrence Block
#39. Fiction works because a part of the mind forgets that it's fiction while we're reading it.
Lawrence Block
#40. 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.
Lawrence Block
#41. 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.
Lawrence Block
#42. 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.
Lawrence Block
#43. I don't know about the rest of the country but in New York more people have learned anonymity from rent control than ever discovered it in a twelve-step program.
Lawrence Block
#44. Life, I announced, is not a B picture. Well, it ain't no De Mille epic either, boss. Things'll work out, Bernie.
Lawrence Block
#45. 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.
Lawrence Block
#46. To say I drank my way into marriage isn't much of an exaggeration, and it's none at all to say I drank my way out of it.
Lawrence Block
#47. Come on in," Elaine said. "She's already here. Pam, this is Mr. Scudder, Matthew Scudder. Matt, I'd like you to meet Pam.
Lawrence Block
#48. 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.
Lawrence Block
#49. Stories are like assholes. Everybody's got one and most of 'em stink.
Lawrence Block
#50. 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 ...
Lawrence Block
#51. But whenever there's the right kind of nut making headlines, a Slasher or an Icepick Prowler, a certain number of people get pistol permits and a certain number of others buy illegal guns. Then some of them get drunk and shoot their wives. None of them ever seems to wind up nailing the Slasher. I
Lawrence Block
#52. The less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do.
Lawrence Block
#53. Something I learned long ago. It is not necessary to know what a person is afraid of. It is enough to know the person is afraid.
Lawrence Block
#54. One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have to be looking for something in order to find something else.
Lawrence Block
#55. My mother's father was from Sligo, and he used to say it was the hardest thing in the world to find a man alive in Dublin who wasn't in the GPO during the Easter Rising. Twenty brave men marched into that post office, he said, and thirty thousand marched out.
Lawrence Block
#56. The novel, I submit, is not merely the ultimate goal. It is also the place to start.
Lawrence Block
#57. Novels are written - as life is lived - One Day At A Time.
Lawrence Block
#58. As a friend of mine, herself a writer, says, 'People who spend the most meaningful hours of their lives in the exclusive company of imaginary people are apt to be a little strange'
Lawrence Block
#59. When you get older, keeping the private stuff private seems less important.
Lawrence Block
#60. Why on earth should I care whether people read me with their eyes or their ears?
Lawrence Block
#62. - 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.)
Lawrence Block
#63. 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.
Lawrence Block
#64. 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.
Lawrence Block
#65. 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.
Lawrence Block
#66. I try to avoid eating endangered species, let alone mythical ones. You
Lawrence Block
#67. So many changes, eating away at the world like water dripping on a rock.
Lawrence Block
#68. People go through changes and life does the damnedest things to us all.
Lawrence Block
#69. 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.
Lawrence Block
#70. You show up at these meetings to stay sober and you walk out with a fucking education.
Lawrence Block
#71. 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.
Lawrence Block
#72. When writing functions in this fashion as self-directed psychotherapy, we err if we demand that people be entertained and enlightened by the process.
Lawrence Block
#73. He's got a new BMW now, thanks to the Galaxy. He can't spell it, but he can drive it like crazy.
Lawrence Block
#74. If you build a better mousetrap, Nature will build a better mouse.
Lawrence Block
#75. 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.
Lawrence Block
#76. When someone put money in your hand you closed your fingers around it and put it in your pocket.
Lawrence Block
#77. 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.
Lawrence Block
#79. You know what I realized?" "What?" "Most of the people I know are dead. I guess that happens
Lawrence Block
#80. As my grandmother used to say, if you've got nothing good to say about someone, let's hear it.
Lawrence Block
#81. 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.
Lawrence Block
#82. Man, I so sick of dinosaurs. They wasn't extinct, I'd go out an' kill 'em myself.
Lawrence Block
#83. I don't plan an awful lot in life just as I don't plan an awful lot in my fiction.
Lawrence Block
#84. Your unconscious mind takes the things you can't handle and plays with them while you sleep until some of the sharp corners are worn off.
Lawrence Block
#85. Being dead means never having to do anything sneaky.
Lawrence Block
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