Quotes from Laura Lippman

I sometimes allow people to infer that I'm much less successful than I am.

I've gotten to do a lot of stuff, traveled, worked hard at my career.

Writing is a sedentary gig unless one has a treadmill desk. But I have long believed writing and working out are complementary disciplines.

I've long believed that the work-out life has lessons for the writing life. I've 'solved' a lot of books while at the gym, in part because I'm not trying to solve them at that precise moment.

Baltimore has been a punchline/punching bag for years - I've landed a few blows, to be fair - but those old jokes are out of touch.

In my newspaper days, your endings could be literally sliced off in the composing room, so it was dangerous to get attached to them. Yet I think this has made me work harder on endings in fiction.

Relationships are chess for women," he said. "They can see the whole board, plan way ahead. They're the queens, after all. We're the kings, limited to one square in any direction, on defense for the whole fucking game.

You can rewrite life all you want, Sandy thought. It's still a play where everyone dies in the end.

Sandy tried to never lose sight of the fact that we tend to order things according to the reality we know, as we discover it. All life is hindsight, really, stories informed by their endings.

Children can be happy when their parents are miserable. But a parent is never happier than her unhappiest child.

Everyone thinks everything's a waste of time when it's not the thing that leads to an answer.

The present is swollen with self-regard for itself, but soon enough the present becomes the past. This present, this day, this very moment we inhabit--it all will be held accountable for the things it didn't know, didn't understand.

hate how swiftly the world moves now, how glib everyone has become. We need to think more, not more quickly.

Ten years. Ten years. Rachel missed her father every day. Not consciously, but his absence was a part of her, like a vine that wraps around a structure, sustains it even as it weakens it.

What was the point of giving children freedom to experiment and fail, if one then turned it all into a tiresome object lesson?

But then again—if one doesn't forgive someone, doesn't one, in a sense, lose that person forever?

There it was again, another strange usage. 'We had words.' Everyone has words...What a useless euphemism. The phrases that people used to make things prettier never worked.

Not everyone has to get the same things all the time in order for life to be fair.

Lately she'd been listening to books on tapes, fat womanly novels as she thought of them. Maeve Binchy, Gail Godwin, Marian Keyes. Pat Conroy—

If you couldn't face the truth about yourself, then you weren't ready for the truth about anything

Nancy began again, and she knew she was going to off-load to Infante the anger she had caught from the kid. Life was just a long game of emotional tag, one bad mood passing from person to person.

Cynthia didn't mind Confederate flags. She'd like to see a law that required every white trash hillbilly to have one tattooed on his or her forehead. You would see them coming that way.

Almost every writer I know dreads the moment when someone tries to give you an idea. It's not that the ideas are bad, just that the relationship between writer and novel is so personal that it's a little like someone trying to play matchmaker for a happily married person.

In her experience, it was those first sixty seconds, from the moment she flashed her P.I. license to the end of her pitch, that she was most likely to earn someone's cooperation. Older people were the easiest, if only because they were so often bored out of their minds that they welcomed any distraction. Men were curt, but they usually found the time, as long as she did the little-me, big-eye, big-chest thing. Women were more skeptical, because women spent their lives listening to bullshit.