Quotes from Laura Lippman

It's very different to have this kid that I'm truly responsible for.

If I waited to be inspired to go to the gym, I'd never get there. I schedule my exercise time; I schedule my work time. This is especially important if you have a day job as I did while writing my first seven novels.

I think Baltimore suffers from nostalgia and it keeps us from being honest in talking about what really happened here. A place doesn't have to be perfect to be beloved, and I love this city and I love it better for seeing its flaws.

I like books steeped in the quotidian - details about work and place. You can learn how to run a chicken-and-waffle restaurant by reading 'Mildred Pierce.' And I like fiction about money.

I'm very empathetic - that might be one of my superpowers.

I'm a morning person, which is a hideous thing to be. No one likes morning people, not even other morning people.

There was nothing more dangerous than people convinced of their own good intentions.

My reading life is like an airport where a bunch of planes circle in a holding pattern, then - boom, boom, boom - several come in for a landing.

I love crime fiction, and I'm proud to be part of it, but I'm not without criticism for my own genre.

Fiction needs writers and readers, and writers should cultivate both.

Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.

There's always time to read. Don't trust a writer who doesn't read. It's like eating food prepared by a cook who doesn't eat.

She might not be as strong as everyone she met, or as fast, or even as smart. But she could bullshit with the best of them. Combine that with a license to carry, and a girl could more than get by in this life.

Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for.

There's a serendipity to real life that the Internet can't duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the one you were looking for, and it's that book that changes your life.

It's a special art, asking people to do things, yet making it seem as if you never asked at all.

The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been.

Baltimore. It's imperfect. Boy, is it imperfect. And there are parts of its past that make you wince. It's not all marble steps and waitresses calling you 'hon,' you know. Racial strife in the sixties, the riots during the Civil War. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was civilized and gay, rotted and polite. The terms are slightly anachronistic now, but I think he was essentially right.

There are, of course, an infinite number of places where one is not, yet only one place where one actually is.

I hate to think how many minutes of my life I've spent on goddamn hold. I want those minutes back. When death comes for me, I want back every minute I was on hold in traffic jams, and behind people with eleven items in the ten items or less line.

But you were a goody-goody, you said.' 'Even goody-goodies think about such things. In fact, I would say that's what defines us. We're always thinking about the things we don't dare do, figuring out where the lines are drawn, so we can go right up to the edge of things, then plead innocence on the ground of a technicality.

All life is hindsight, really, stories informed by their endings.

Besides, what is the whole truth and nothing but the truth? The truth is not a finite commodity that can be contained within identifiable borders. The truth is messy, riotous, overrunning everything. You can never know the whole truth of anything. And if you could, you would wish you didn't.

Sometimes you have to destroy things, even people, in order to save them. (7)