Quotes from Lawrence Block

he met a nice girl and got married, and they had a kid, and then either he found out she wasn't so nice after all, or she found out he wasn't, or the discovery was mutual. They got a divorce

They've transformed the weather into some sort of celestial crap game.

You got to ask a street question to get a street answer.

I haven't seen her in five years. Well, hell, I haven't had a cigarette in twelve, and I damn well wanted one for a minute there. Sometimes I don't think anybody ever gets over anything.

all six of them a license." "That

Forgiving himself came easy to him. His, he'd come to realize, was a forgiving nature.

If you are lying, you have built your lie on true foundations.

It took a while to tell but it hadn't taken all that long to live;

Faith and fear, they tell me, can't coexist. I try to practice by doing what I'm afraid to do, and I manage (now and then, anyway) by means of faith. Faith that I will do myself more good than harm by the risks I am willing to take as a writer. And faith, finally, that the best service I can do myself is to do the best and most honest work of which I am capable.

He was always inclined to be a moody man, very exuberant when things were going right, very depressed when they weren't.

Too damn long.' He put his coat on an empty chair, settled a slim attaché case on top of it, and placed a narrow-brimmed gray hat on top of the attaché case. He seated himself across the table from me and dug his lucky charm out of his pocket. I watched him set it spinning. 'Too goddamned long, Matt,' he told the coin.

If you cannot stand the spoon upright in the cup, then the coffee is too weak.

coffee must be 'hot as hell, black as sin, and sweet as love.

you have a better chance to get pregnant if you keep your knees way up and stay that way as long as you can.

I rode to the fourth floor, poked around until I found the stairway, and walked down a flight. I almost always do this and I sometimes wonder why. I think someone must have done it in a movie once and I was evidently impressed, but it's really a waste of time, especially when the elevator in question is self-service.

Wasn't it Will Rogers who said he never met a man he didn't like?" "Whoever it was, I'd say he didn't get out much.

I told Carolyn it was a great day for running, and she told me there was no such thing.

Tomorrow's always there, just over the horizon. Until the tomorrows run out.

I see," I said, which is something I very often say when I don't.

You think he just died of natural causes?" "This is New York. Murder's a natural cause in this city.

philately is far and away the area of my life where I spend the most time and effort making genuinely inconsequential decisions.

If you are trying to write realistic fiction and you people it extensively with overdrawn characters, you're working against yourself. You can occasionally get away with filling books and stories with grotesques, but unless your name's Carson McCullers it gets tricky. A less obvious form of caricature consists of giving an otherwise ordinary character a trait or attribute or mannerism on which the reader may focus his attention.

The Parker series, by Donald E. Westlake writing as Richard Stark. The University of Chicago Press has just reissued the complete series in trade paperback, and that's a good thing, because my own

The Players are gentlemen," he'd intoned, "pretending to be actors. The Lambs are actors, pretending to be gentlemen. And the Friars—the Friars are neither, pretending to be both.