Quotes by Lawrence Block

Oh, I don't believe in anything. I especially don't believe in astrology. Know why?
Why?
Because I'm a Saggitarius, and every Sagittarius knows astrology is a lot of hooey.

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.

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.

Fuck you! I hope you die!
Everybody Dies, I said. So fuck you.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'

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.

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.

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

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

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

Being dead means never having to do anything sneaky.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 can't persuade myself that one of the problems facing the planet today might be a shortage of books by me.

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.

I've always essentially been a New Yorker.

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.

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

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