Quotes from Lawrence Block

I don't know about the rest of the country but in New York more people have learned anonymity from rent control than ever discovered it in a twelve-step program.

Man, I so sick of dinosaurs. They wasn't extinct, I'd go out an' kill 'em myself.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

It's enough of a strain killing people. I've no time for deer. --Mick Ballou

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.

Everybody has mean little places inside himself.

One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.

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.

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

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.

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.

I dialed it now, and the machine picked up. I listened to a dead man's voice. I hung up, wondering how long it would be before someone unplugged the machine, how long before the telephone company cut off the phone service. You don't die all at once. Not anymore. These days you die a little at a time.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one...

I wouldn't presume to define noir - if we could define it, we wouldn't need to use a French word for it - but it seems to me it's more a way of looking at the world than what one sees.

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

Why on earth should I care whether people read me with their eyes or their ears?

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.