Lawrence Block > Quotes

“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

“Fuck you! I hope you die!"
"Everybody Dies," I said. "So fuck you.”
― Lawrence Block, Everybody Dies

“If you cannot stand a spoon upright in the cup, then the coffee is too weak.”
― Lawrence Block

“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.”
― Lawrence Block, Out on the Cutting Edge

“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, Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print

“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

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

“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, The Sins of the Fathers

“She knew how much I needed her. And now she was teasing, playing games. I looked at her and watched her turn into a sex symbol in front of my eyes. She did not look sweet and virginal and lovely anymore. I looked at the very simple summer dress and saw breasts and belly and hips. I looked at her eyes and saw lust as naked as my own.”
― Lawrence Block, Grifter's Game

“People don't get to change things. Things change people once in a while, but people don't change things.”
― Lawrence Block, In the Midst of Death

“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, The Sins of the Fathers

“Sometimes it's a dog-eat-dog world and the rest of the time it's the other way around.”
― Lawrence Block, A Dance At The Slaughterhouse

“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, The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams

“Dangerous thing, giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil. And the capacity to make the wrong choice more often than not.”
― Lawrence Block, The Sins of the Fathers

“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

“It's enough of a strain killing people. I've no time for deer.
--Mick Ballou”
― Lawrence Block, Everybody Dies

“You show up at these meetings to stay sober and you walk out with a fucking education.”
― Lawrence Block, A Drop of the Hard Stuff

“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, All the Flowers Are Dying

“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, In the Midst of Death

“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.”
― Lawrence Block, Eight Million Ways to Die

“Everybody has mean little places inside himself.”
― Lawrence Block, The Sins of the Fathers

“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, Manhattan Noir

“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?”
― Lawrence Block, Eight Million Ways to Die

“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.”
― Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams

“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.”
― Lawrence Block, A Drop of the Hard Stuff

“She made love with the freshness of an impatient virgin and the ingenuity of a sex-scarred whore.”
― Lawrence Block, Grifter's Game

“One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.”
― Lawrence Block

“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, Telling Lies for Fun & Profit

“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, Manhattan Noir

“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.”
― Lawrence Block, The Liar's Bible: A Handbook for Fiction Writers