Quotes from Lawrence Block

There's a short story of Saki's that you remind me of. 'Romance at short notice was her specialty.' That's the last line, and doesn't it just fit you to a tee?

My performance as Major Breakthrough (whose comrades in arms include Private Bath, Corporal Punishment and General Nuisance) had improved somewhat.

Brad Steiger's recently published book, Sex and the Supernatural. (Perhaps Steiger and Tracy can someday collaborate on Sex and the Supernatural Stewardess, for that matter.)

He'd disposed of her corpse by feeding it to the hogs.

I threw myself down upon that small soft body, and her hand clutched me and tucked me home. She worked and strained in sweet agony beneath me. I brought her there. I heard her cry out and felt her quiver, and then I melted at last inside her in unutterable delight.

Don and I took Bill Coons and made a writer out of him.

all the topics embraced in the title of the Kronhausens' fine book Pornography and the Law.

I heard the pitter patter of little old feet.

wrote it in the summer of 1959 in my furnished room at the Hotel Rio, on West Forty-Seventh Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues.

A British Cabinet Minister finds that To lie in the nude Is not at all rude But to lie in the House is obscene and a government is rocked

A drink? No, whatever for? He used the downstairs lavatory because one really didn't want the nuisance of a full bladder in media res, poured himself a glass of Evian water because one didn't want a dry mouth, either, and mounted the stairs to the master bedroom.

bordello tokens

seem to be the only person to have used the name Ben Christopher on a book. Strange, innit? Strange Embrace

And various bibliographic sources agree that "Like a Thief in the Night" appeared in the May 1983 edition of Cosmopolitan. But I've never been able to confirm this. I don't think it ever appeared in a magazine.

You see one, you've seen 'em both. And here I was, Munro Leaf's watchbird. Here is a watchbird watching two lesbians. Here is a watchbird watching YOU.

For my own part, I'd never live with anyone, male of female. I have trouble enough living with myself.

was now living on Haven Avenue, in Washington Heights

She said it casually, but it was like a casual stroke with a shiv. (p.140)

while all of this was going on, a man's face, a slight caricature of the artist as a young voyeur, loomed in a window over the bed and leered down at the two girls. The caption read, "What do they know about love uptown?" That's an old and not very funny joke, and if you don't already know it you're not going to read it here, because it's a bore. But it does fit the circumstances well enough.

There'd been a big fat bestseller a few years earlier called The Devil in Bucks County, and I'm sure the Berkley folks were aware of it. They probably had it in mind when they made the deal. The title I suggested was The Trouble with Bucks County, and they used half of it. The Trouble with Eden—well, it's not a bad title.

she sounded like Lizbeth Scott in those Bogart movies. I've always wished I had a voice

I could hear the cicadas like a vortex of hundreds of tiny violins. I'd always hated them, too. Anytime cicadas showed up, bad juju lurked nearby.

One must know a great many unimportant things in order to know those few things which are important.

Give a man a fish,' he said, 'and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and for the rest of his life you can sell him rods and reels and hooks and leaders and flies and lures and God only knows what else.