Quotes from Dennis Lehane

Happiness comes in moments, & then it's gone until the next time. Could be years. But sadness settles it.

She smiled darkly and shook her head. 'I'm not crazy. I'm not. Of course what else would a crazy person claim? That's the Kafkaesque genius of it all. If you're not crazy but people have told the world you are, then all your protests to the contrary just underscore their point. Do you see what I'm saying?

Everyone sees different things.

I loved this woman the way you love ... well, nothing," he said, a note of suprise in his voice. "You can't compare that kind of love to anything, can you? It's its own unique gift.

She was afraid of all that and so much more, but what terrified her most was inside of her, an insect of unnatural intelligence who'd been living in her brain her entire life, playing with it, clicking across it, wrenching loose its cables on a whim.

Men. If you give them half a chance, they'll fuck you over just to prove they can.

Sympathy's easy. You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power. Empathy is getting down on your knees and looking someone else in the eye and realizing you could be them, and that all that separates you is luck.

It's hard to close the door on optimistic expectations when you love someone.

and she was so simply his love, his girl, watching him approach as if she were memorizing him and his walk and those flowers and this moment, and he wanted to ask her what sound a heart made when it broke from pleasure, when just the sight of someone filled you the way food, blood, and air never could...

I normally can't stand vice-free people. They conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority. Plus they suck the life right out of a party.

The best thing that can happen to people entering creative professions is the dwindling of all other possibilities.

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

I normally can't stand vice-free people. They conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority. Plus, they suck the life right out of a party.

I sort of play golf because a lot of my friends are into it, but I'm awful - my handicap is about six or seven thousand.

I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic - hyper-realistic - stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn't meld the two.

I was blessed to grow up in really interesting times and to go back to a home where I was very safe.

It's good not only to realize that you can't please all of the people all of the time, but that you don't want to. There's a certain type of reader that you don't ever want to write for.

I have a lot of rage about things that didn't happen to me, tied up with watching an immigrant, working-class father struggle to make his way through the world - and seeing how society was modeled to keep him in his place.

I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chauffeur - do whatever it took. But from the moment I took my first writing workshop, I was a writer.

And he hated himself and hated her,too, for the ruin they'd made of each other.

You've learned that every good lie is threaded with truth and every accepted truth leaks lies.

Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.

I loved this woman the way you love ... well, nothing," he said, a note of suprise in his voice. "You can't compare that kind of love to anything, can you? It's its own unique gift.

I love television. I think we're in a renaissance of epic proportion in television now.