Quotes from Lawrence Block

Or cut my own throat as I had cut the throat of the girl. Wolfe Tone, jailed after the Irish Rebellion of 1798, had sawed through his throat with a penknife. I wondered if I could do the same. Would the hand falter?

We touched glasses very solemnly and drank a toast to health and love and money and time to enjoy them.

Baby, baby, naughty baby Hush, you squalling thing, I say Peace this moment, peace, or maybe Bonaparte will pass this way Baby, baby, he's a giant Tall and black as Monmouth steeple And he breakfasts, dines and suppers Every day on naughty people Baby, baby, if he hears you As he gallops past the house Limb from limb at once he'll tear you Just as pussy tears a mouse

At Arbor Court, with the cats fed and tea made, she said, "Bowling." "I had to get away from the bookstore," I said, "and there were things I needed to do, but I wasn't ready to do them yet. And every once in a while for the past few years I've told myself that I really ought to go over to Bowl-Mor, and I never did, and then the building came down and all I had left was a resentment.

And he'll beat you, beat you, beat you And he'll beat you all to pap And he'll eat you, eat you, eat you Every morsel snap snap snap! English Lullaby

The Ballad of the IRT," about a heroic homeward-bound Brooklyn shipping clerk beheaded by a closing subway door, wound up on Dave Van Ronk's second Folkways album.

Who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy's chowder?

Empress Messalina has become as synonymous with nymphomania as has the Emperor Caligula with cruelty. Several of the Caesars, most notably Eliogabalus, were almost certainly polymorphously perverse; that is, any sexual aberration was automatically attractive to them, and the more unacceptable an activity might be, the more it therefore appealed.

I try to avoid eating endangered species, let alone mythical ones. You

regummed. A regummed stamp is one which has lost its original gum somewhere along the way, only to have it replaced with new gum. When the equivalent is performed on, say, a Rembrandt oil painting, we call it restoration; when such restoration is performed on a postage stamp, we're more apt to regard it as a crime against nature, and a clear-cut example of philatelic fraud.

Living proof of indiscretions makes bad company on the morning after.

She was a Celebrity Fucker.

Wait a minute. Can a general worldwide collector care more about some countries than others? Is there a Most-Favored Nation clause in his contract with philately? Ah. Wouldn't you know it? Now I've got a topic for next month's column. . .

was thinking about getting myself a VCR. I could see any movie I wanted any time of the day, and it doesn't cost but two or three dollars to rent one. But it's not the same, watching on your own set in your own room, and on a bitty TV screen. It's like the difference between praying at home and in church.

Perhaps I've just mounted the initial stamp on a page that used to be blank. Perhaps I've filled the final space on that page. Or, as is more often the case, perhaps I've added a fifteenth stamp to a page, thus reducing its number of blank spaces from nineteen to eighteen. In any event, I'm looking at progress—and I take a moment to enjoy it.

Oh, I don't believe in anything. I especially don't believe in astrology. Know why?" "Why?" "Because I'm a Saggitarius, and every Sagittarius knows astrology is a lot of hooey.

A mind may be a terrible thing to waste, but it's an even worse thing to have to listen to.

In the Sitting Room, the walls were given over to framed Ape and Spy caricatures from the old Vanity Fair

I've heard it said that everybody stops smoking, that the trick is to be alive when it happens.

After years of clandestine circulation, Frank Harris's erotic autobiography, My Life and Loves, came on the open market a few years ago. Harris, fin de

he was sort of a yutz, and he would have married her, because that went along with being the kind of yutz he was, but thank God she said something to her Aunt Vicki, and Vicki had a cousin who knew somebody

myself was increasingly early to bed and early to rise, though I can't say the effects were as the adage promised.

The accumulator, with his acquisitions stuffed into boxes in no apparent order, is every bit as acceptable a philatelist as the collector trying slowly and painstakingly to fill, with flawlessly centered, post office-fresh examples, all the spaces in a single hingeless album. We're all in this together, and I figure whatever system we devise for ourselves is just fine.

The House at Sugar Beach, New York Times reporter Helene Cooper's memoir of her girlhood as a member of the Liberian upper crust.