Lawrence Block Quotations

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

Why on earth should I care whether people read me with their eyes or their ears?

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

New York is an ugly city, a dirty city... But there is one thing about it. Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.

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.

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

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.

When you get older, keeping the private stuff private seems less important.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dangerous thing, giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil. And the capacity to make the wrong choice more often than not.

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...

People don't get to change things. Things change people once in a while, but people don't change things.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I’ve tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don’t want to go on.

If you build a better mousetrap, Nature will build a better mouse.

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.

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'

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

I’ve always essentially been a New Yorker,

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

If you cannot stand a spoon upright in the cup, then the coffee is too weak.

And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.

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

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.

Ideas come to people who are receptive to them.

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.

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.

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.

It's the easiest thing in the world to know God's will. You just wait and see what happens, and that's it.

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