Quotes from Lawrence Block

Now I can't say I approve of counterfeit stamps. But it's hard for me to work up a lot of indignation at a forger who's been dead for the better part of a century. I wouldn't want to buy a fake sold as a genuine stamp, or an official reprint under the illusion that it's an original, but in certain cases and at the right price any of these oddities might find a welcome in my collection. They all make the philatelic universe even more interesting.

Some are errors. There's Malta 20a, for example, the 2-1/2p dull blue; it's supposed to be surcharged "One Penny," but this variety has it "One Pnney." It's affordable, and visually remarkable, and I picked up my copy when it was offered in a block of four, with three non-erroneous companions.

Some months after that, Markham was published, subtitle and all, and the first I knew of it was when I got a phone call late one night from a writer friend of mine named Randall P. Garrett. Now Randy lived substantially less than a mile from us, around 110th Street and Broadway, and when he wasn't home working he was around the corner in a neighborhood

When I have a look at my own albums, it strikes me how thin they'd be but for war and rebellion.

I was surprised the drugs were still around. Cops are apt to pocket them, and men who would not take loose cash from the dead have trouble resisting the little pills that pick you up or settle you down. I took the Seconal and the Dex along with me.

But that wouldn't happen to us. I'd read a book of John Barth's, The End of the Road, and I'd absorbed its most important lesson. When you have to make a choice, and all else fails, take the one on the left.

might damn them both for treachery and lechery, but I was so far removed from the realness of it that I was more struck by the fortuitous rhyme of those two sins than by the awesome enormity of the crime.

Or we skip all that and just show him getting out a taxi in front of the Hotel Northwestern.

I know what you mean," I said. "The thing is, it's not something I have to be told. I've always been a stubborn son of a bitch. When I start something I have a hell of a time letting go of it. I think that's the main way I solve things, to tell you the truth. I don't do it by being brilliant. I just hang on like a bulldog until something shakes loose.

that's where Fredric Brown spent his later years." "Fredric Brown? Our Fredric Brown?" "We were on the bus together." "You and Fredric Brown." "Right." "On a bus in Tucson." "When he was trying to work out a plot," I said, "he would ride buses all night, and thoughts would come to him." "I'll bet they would. 'Why am I up so late? What am I doing on this broken-down rattletrap?

Now I say two prayers a day. I say please in the morning and thank you every night.

He went on, hurting her, torturing her. And then a very strange thing happened. Very strange. So strange she didn't understand it at first. So strange she couldn't think about it, couldn't even realize what it was. All she could do was react. The fire in her breasts and loins turned from pain to pleasure. The ache that dominated her entire being became an ache that craved immediate satisfaction. She didn't want to escape, not any more.

Assuming that the manner in which something is said is often as relevant as its content, I have edited as little as possible, changing sentence structure only when clarity would be otherwise sacrificed, and revising unorthodox spelling on the premise that linotype operators have a difficult enough life as it is.

David Maurer's nonfiction work The Big Con.

I'd read Skid Row U.S.A., by Sara Harris

Some years back a small library I'd purchased had included a Cadwallader Club limited edition of the two Alice books, bound in red leather with gold stamping. John Tenniel's illustrations are the ones everybody knows, but the Cadwallader edition featured two dozen dazzling color plates by Michael Trossman. I never did get around to shelving the books

Enough! Introductions bore the reader and the writer simultaneously, the reader anxious to get on to the meat of the book, the writer at least as anxious to turn in his manuscript, pick up his check, and go out and get drunk. I'll end this now and permit us both to go our separate ways.

Research is a joy, especially when one is not burdened with an excessive reverence for the truth.

You can take the girl out of St. Athanasius, etc. —Who was he, do you happen to know? Not Herr Bratwurst, Saint Whatchamacallit. —Athanasius. No idea. So yes, I'm reasonably certain she had an affair, although I don't think it was the kind that would put Antony and Cleopatra in the shade. But whatever

The hotel owed its marvelous name to the Magic Castle, a private club for magicians located just up the hill to the north. I'd been there once a few years earlier as the guest of a friend, and we sat at a table where an impressively drunk practitioner of the dark arts was showing off with a deck of cards. "I'll bet you've never seen anything like this before," he said at one point, and puked onto the table with sangfroid I found enviable.)

I might add that one short novel of Schnitzler's, Casanova's Homecoming, was on the shelves of my parents' library, and I had the great good fortune to read it at an impressionable age.

The book probably owes a little to The Tooth and the Nail, by Bill S. Ballinger, a fine writer who's pretty much forgotten these

I wasn't sure I liked him, but I was just as happy not to like the men I worked for. It bothered me less that way if I felt I was giving them less than full value.

When Terry Zobeck was working away at my bibliography, A Trawl Among the Shelves, I kept recalling books and stories and articles of mine that had slipped my mind, and reporting what I could recall; Terry, apparently indefatigable, would scour the internet until he came up with a copy of the new discovery, add it to his collection, and write it up for the bibliography.