Lawrence Block Quotes

30 quotes in 476 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• 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...
• 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…
• Booze and tobacco and lots of sex. It keeps a lad young.
• I’ve always essentially been a New Yorker,
• I’ve tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don’t want to go on.
• I can’t persuade myself that one of the problems facing the planet today might be a shortage of books by me,
• 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…
• 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…
• One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have to be looking for something in order to find something else.
• 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 never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• I don't plan an awful lot in life just as I don't plan an awful lot in my fiction.
• When you get older, keeping the private stuff private seems less important.
• Why on earth should I care whether people read me with their eyes or their ears?

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