Dennis Lehane Quotes

69 quotes in 1331 categories

• Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to…
• He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.
• Vanity is a weakness. I know this. It's a shallow dependence on the exterior self, on how one looks instead of what one is. I…
• Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That's how you focus the world. It's the only reason you should ever try this writing…
• Visitation Street is urban opera writ large. Gritty and magical, filled with mystery, poetry and pain, Ivy Pochoda’s voice recalls Richard Price, Junot Diaz, and…
• Patrick Kenzie asking a bemused waitress for a newspaper in smalltown USA. 'It's like a homepage without a scroll button?'
• Choice, I've always believed, is all that separates us from animals.
• The loneliness of another can be shocking when it lays itself bare without warning.
• Catch me on a good day, I think half of my books aren't too bad. Catch me on a bad day, I think I've never…
• Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.
• I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.
• I love to write, so it rarely seems like work - even when it gets arduous.
• I sort of play golf because a lot of my friends are into it, but I'm awful - my handicap is about six or seven…
• I was blessed to grow up in really interesting times and to go back to a home where I was very safe.
• The best thing that can happen to people entering creative professions is the dwindling of all other possibilities.
• I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write…
• I have a lot of rage about things that didn't happen to me, tied up with watching an immigrant, working-class father struggle to make his…
• I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chauffeur - do whatever it took. But from…
• I won the parental lottery. Most of the kids I grew up with either came from really fractured homes, or really violent ones. I went…
• It's good not only to realize that you can't please all of the people all of the time, but that you don't want to. There's…

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