Quotes from Laura Lippman

No one in the world loved you quite the way a younger sibling did.

Bad taste never dies. It just keeps evolving.

It must be nice to be so strong and to think it's because you're so good, that you live right and eat right, so you deserve your health and happiness. But there is such a thing as luck, and there's more bad luck than good in this world.

I hate the habit of calling women high-maintenance, as if they were cars or appliances. As if women, in general, require care in a way that men do not.

There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again.

Doing nothing," Inez said, "is a choice in its own way. When you do nothing, you still do something.

No one at fifteen was ever in love, outside of Romeo and Juliet, and maybe not even them. Old Giff used to argue that the star-crossed lovers simply were buzzed on the fumes of forbidden lust. Give them thirty years of togetherness, Old Giff always said, and Juliet would be plunging the dagger into Romeo.

The thing people are never indifferent to are differences.

Heloise long ago reconciled herself to the idea that all is fair in love and war, which is just another way of saying that nothing in life is ever fair, because life is love and war.

Her dilemma—the eternal human dilemma—is that she wants a chance to revisit her choices with full knowledge of the future.

Just because you worked hard on something didn't make it worth doing.

Tough, yet brittle. That's the thing about being really hard. When you do break, you shatter.

Going to college don't make you from somewhere, any more than a cat born in an over can call itself a biscuit.

She liked what she saw, although she knew being a not-beautiful woman was supposed to be a tragedy.

My husband and I are both proud public school graduates.

I think I'm part of a generation of crime writers all of whom woke up independently and recoiled with horror at the fact that we'd chosen this very conservative genre.

I don't know where my phone is half the time.

I spent grades one through nine in Baltimore City, leaving for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of education I was receiving.

People still struggle with this notion of gifted writers somehow being in touch with a higher power, but it's all about showing up and doing the job, meeting deadlines, working hard.

Reporting is pretty vital to me. It keeps me connected to the world. A 40-hour-per-week day job may be less feasible as time goes on.

Anyone can love a perfect place. Loving Baltimore takes some resilience.

Writers who don't read can't write well. It's that simple. The more you read, the better you read, the better you'll write. The upside is that you can't read too much, and even 'junk' reading can be constructive.

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.

My husband, David Simon, and I make our livings using our imaginations.