Quotes from Lawrence Block

the gun that had done me the kindness of jamming or misfiring, had skidded halfway across the room, and Vince bent over and reached for it, than thought better of it and used his foot instead.

Caricatures, a coffee house on Macdougal with a batch of caricatures in the window, along with a signed note from Maxwell Bodenheim, the archetypical Village bohemian who'd been murdered a few years earlier.

Breakfast was always a slab of cold black toast and a cup of thick black coffee. Lunch and dinner were always the same—a tin plate piled with a suspicious pilaff, mostly rice with occasional bits of lamb and shreds of vegetable matter of indeterminate origin.

AGES AGO, WHEN THEY swore me in as a NYPD cop, I wore a uniform I'd bought at Jonas Rathburn & Sons, a cop shop around the corner from the old Centre Street headquarters. Over the years I picked up other gear there—handcuffs, a Kevlar vest, a nightstick to replace the one that disappeared one

an auction where most of the bidders wouldn't pay thirty-five cents to see Christ ride a bicycle.

It was a Mexican cigarette and not so tightly packed as the brand she had smoked in the United States but in the past week or so she had gotten used to it and now liked it as well as American cigarettes.

And was there anything on earth as dangerous as getting everything you ever wanted? As

When I was a kid, buying packets and penny approvals and filling spaces in my Modern Stamp Album, nothing was easier to find and to afford than those German issues. Think of it, a stamp that cost fifty billion marks! And it was mine for a penny!

The world's a bastard. Life just happens to people.

Right there! See the blue on its head? See the long tail?" "Oh, there he is," I said, just to bring this little farce to an end. I couldn't see the bird, and I knew I wasn't going to see the bird, and I was rapidly tiring of the whole enterprise. "Beautiful, isn't he?" "Gorgeous," I agreed. "I'd have hated to miss him.

My crime seemed destined to remain a secret forever.

I don't sleep, have not slept in sixteen years—

Your mother spreads herself for camels.

The book was We Walk Alone by Ann Aldrich.

Everybody has one thing that gets to him. Women or liquor or gambling or something. The trouble is when you've got more than one vice.

You may recall a Jules Feiffer cartoon—you may recall a hundred

In June of 1955 I graduated from Bennett High School in Buffalo, New York. The school was named after one Lewis J. Bennett, and you now know as much about the man as I ever did. Having one's name on something enduring—a school, a bridge, a building—is thought to provide immortality of a sort, but if that's immortality, well, I'm with

September I arrived at Antioch College

When rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it.

Haiku's such a bore / Sheer pretentious balderdash / Stick it in your hat.

Another title that could be questioned is Lingo Dan (1903) by Percival Pollard.

And this almost tautological business of having done one's best can't be reserved exclusively for parents.

It's an even money that your Diners' Club card will be good at the decent cathouses.

type my work and get it copied before delivering the original to my agent. (Not too many years before that I'd have made a carbon copy. Do you remember carbon paper? Does anybody?)