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

“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

“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

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

— Lawrence Block

“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

“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

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

— Lawrence Block

“You show up at these meetings to stay sober and you walk out with a fucking education.”

— Lawrence Block

“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

“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

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

“She made love with the freshness of an impatient virgin and the ingenuity of a sex-scarred whore.”

— Lawrence Block

“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

“I stood for a moment, letting my ears do the walking, and then I gave the bell a thorough ring and waited thirty thoughtful seconds before ringing it again.
And that, let me assure you, is not a waste of time. Public institutions throughout the fifty states provide food and clothing and shelter for lads who don't ring the bell first.”

— Lawrence Block

“Is that what I am? I don't know what the hell I am anymore."
"Oh, bullshit. You're a guy, a human being. Just another poor son of a bitch who doesn't want to be alone when the sacred ginmill closes.”

— Lawrence Block

“The novel, I submit, is not merely the ultimate goal. It is also the place to start.”

— Lawrence Block

“As my grandmother used to say, if you've got nothing good to say about someone, let's hear it.”

— Lawrence Block

“Your unconscious mind takes the things you can't handle and plays with them while you sleep until some of the sharp corners are worn off.”

— Lawrence Block

“So many changes, eating away at the world like water dripping on a rock.”

— Lawrence Block

“My glass was empty. I poured more scotch into it, took a small sip, and all at once the silly thing was empty again.
Strange.
Then it was full again.
And then it was empty again.
Strange, I thought. Fool glass must have a hole in it. Scotch disappears the instant it's poured.
Strange.
Then I was stretched out on the bed, too tired and too drunk to bother removing my shoes. My eyes closed themselves and the world crept away on little cat feet, leaving me floating in the middle of the air.”

— Lawrence Block

When writing functions in this fashion as self-directed psychotherapy, we err if we demand that people be entertained and enlightened by the process.

— Lawrence Block

When someone put money in your hand you closed your fingers around it and put it in your pocket.

— Lawrence Block

“WHEN you hit a gay bar in the middle of a weekday afternoon you wonder why they don't call it something else.”

— Lawrence Block

“People go through changes and life does the damnedest things to us all.”

— Lawrence Block

“Fiction works because a part of the mind forgets that it's fiction while we're reading it.”

— Lawrence Block

-And I won't deny your neighbors will take you more seriously if you tell them you've written a novel. (Of course if that's the main concern, just go and tell them. You don't have to write anything. Just lie a little. Don't worry-they won't beg to read the manuscript.)

— Lawrence Block

“It was still there, a low-grade fever in the blood, an itch somewhere down beneath the skin, where you couldn't scratch it.”

— Lawrence Block

“A treat indeed, to read Raymond Chandler for the first time. I almost envied the man,”

— Lawrence Block

“We're all whirling merrily through the void on a dying planet, and gay people are just doing their usual number, being shamelessly trendy as always. Right out in front on the cutting edge of death.”

— Lawrence Block

“Martin Greer Galton had ceased troubling his fellow man in 1964, when a cerebral aneurysm achieved what most of his acquaintances and business associates would have dearly loved to have had a hand in.”

— Lawrence Block

“Sometimes it's a dog-eat-dog world and the rest of the time it's the other way around.”

— Lawrence Block

“He was always inclined to be a moody man, very exuberant when things were going right, very depressed when they weren't.”

— Lawrence Block

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

— Lawrence Block

“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.”

— Lawrence Block

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

— Lawrence Block

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

— Lawrence Block

“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.”

— Lawrence Block

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

— Lawrence Block

“Ideas come to people who are receptive to them.”

— Lawrence Block

“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.”

— Lawrence Block

“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.”

— Lawrence Block

“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.”

— Lawrence Block

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

— Lawrence Block

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.

— Lawrence Block

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

— Lawrence Block

“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.”

— Lawrence Block

“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.”

— 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