Quotes from Lawrence Block

But whenever there's the right kind of nut making headlines, a Slasher or an Icepick Prowler, a certain number of people get pistol permits and a certain number of others buy illegal guns. Then some of them get drunk and shoot their wives. None of them ever seems to wind up nailing the Slasher. I

And I won't deny your neighbors will take you more seriously if you tell them you've written a novel. (Of course if that's the main concern, just go and tell them. You don't have to write anything. Just lie a little. Don't worry—they won't beg to read the manuscript.)

novels pass in and out of my hands while volumes of poetry are mine for life.

It was still there, a low-grade fever in the blood, an itch somewhere down beneath the skin, where you couldn't scratch it.

A treat indeed, to read Raymond Chandler for the first time. I almost envied the man

We're all whirling merrily through the void on a dying planet, and gay people are just doing their usual number, being shamelessly trendy as always. Right out in front on the cutting edge of death.

I settled for a cup of coffee. Only it wasn't coffee. It was a coffee substitute made by grinding up dandelion roots. The idea was that it wouldn't keep you awake, and it's always seemed to me that the only thing coffee really has going for it is that it will keep you awake.

Being dead means never having to do anything sneaky.

Martin Greer Galton had ceased troubling his fellow man in 1964, when a cerebral aneurysm achieved what most of his acquaintances and business associates would have dearly loved to have had a hand in.

My glass was empty. I poured more scotch into it, took a small sip, and all at once the silly thing was empty again. Strange. Then it was full again. And then it was empty again. Strange, I thought. Fool glass must have a hole in it. Scotch disappears the instant it's poured. Strange. Then I was stretched out on the bed, too tired and too drunk to bother removing my shoes. My eyes closed themselves and the world crept away on little cat feet, leaving me floating in the middle of the air.

Well, you live and you learn, and generally in that order. I

When someone put money in your hand you closed your fingers around it and put it in your pocket.

He's got a new BMW now, thanks to the Galaxy. He can't spell it, but he can drive it like crazy.

The moving finger writes, and having writ Moves on. Nor all your piety and wit Can call it back to cancel half a line Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.

Forcible sodomy and illegal entry, you put them both down and you get a jury confused. They figure it's two ways of saying the same thing.

Come on in," Elaine said. "She's already here. Pam, this is Mr. Scudder, Matthew Scudder. Matt, I'd like you to meet Pam.

While at SMLA, I wrote a science fiction short-short called "Make A Prison." It worked its way all the way down to the very bottom of the S-F food chain, finally selling to Bob Lowndes at Original Science Fiction Stories for a half cent a word, then wound up in Judith Merril's prestigious annual anthology. I was elated—but I never wrote another piece of science fiction.

People go through changes and life does the damnedest things to us all.

any departure from reality that could easily be avoided ought to be avoided.

You know what I realized?" "What?" "Most of the people I know are dead. I guess that happens

Hopper was neither an illustrator nor a narrative painter. His paintings don't tell stories. What they do is suggest—powerfully, irresistibly—that there are stories within them, waiting to be told. He shows us a moment in time, arrayed on a canvas; there's clearly a past and a future, but it's our task to find it for ourselves.

Life, I announced, is not a B picture. Well, it ain't no De Mille epic either, boss. Things'll work out, Bernie.

Being broke is not a crime, nor is it proof of one's inadequacy as a writer or as a human being. If you go around with an attitude of implicit apology for being temporarily without funds, it's going to do you more harm than good.

I looked down into my glass. It held club soda, but the way I was gazing into it you'd have thought it was filled with something stronger. I used to stare like that into glasses of whiskey, as if they contained coded answers. All they did was dissolve the questions, but there was a time when that was enough.