Quotes from Lawrence Block

Pleasure Cruise for 137 Corpses" The fire broke out in the ship's writing-room at 2:30 AM. While the passengers and most of the crew slept soundly, the flames raced through the ship. In an unbelievably

Women (don't) follow logic's rules when they (commit) adultery.

Death is not always an occasion for sorrow.

Good evening," I said. "I suppose you're wondering why I summoned you all here.

Set your mind at rest," he said. "I don't steal from clients, I just overcharge them. It's a lot more lucrative in the long run and you spend less time in prison.

When I decided in my mid-fifties to return to a hobby I'd abandoned twenty years earlier, I didn't know what sort of a collector I'd be. As a boy I'd started out collecting everything, then narrowed my focus to British Empire—specifically, to the Scott Specialty Album for Great Britain, British Europe, and British Oceania. In my mid-twenties I'd begun collecting Benelux as well, and in my mid-thirties, when my first marriage ended, I sold everything.

Thanks! Lawrence Block Ebook Design: JW Manus

What does it all

One begins a journey with an eye on one's destination. Somewhere along the way, one learns (if one's lucky) that it's the journey itself that's important. One buys a stamp album with the intention of filling it—but it is in moving toward this goal that satisfaction lies, not in attaining it.

Beacon's leading light, one Orrie Hitt. I

Be careful... What the dude said, ain't it? ... One lived in the woods and didn't pay his taxes. Musta been before Lyme disease, when you could still get by with that shit. You know the dude I talkin' about. Said to watch out for jobs you got to dress up for." "Thoreau." "Yeah, that's him.

attract attention. And if they did get out a cry

So where does the human error come in? Well, sometimes I buy a stamp and mount it in my album without troubling to log it in my catalog. And later I find it offered on somebody else's list, and see that it's one I don't have, and buy it again. And then when I go to mount the new copy in my album, there's one already there.

If today is a consummation devoutly to be wished, how can I regret anything that helped bring it into being?

Well, that was well before awesome. People who say awesome now wouldn't be born for another thirty years. What's it about, Bern? Colonies on Alpha Centauri? Space ships shooting at each other with lasers?

New Brunswick, New Jersey, where I had to cut off two of its feet to get it upstairs to my third-floor office at 16 Stratford Place. There, for all I know, it remains to this day.)

Bitter cups of coffee, my life and my trip measured out like Prufrock's in coffee spoons, clothes sweaty, smelly, bra strap digging into flesh, eyes reddened, gritty as if circled with sand, sour taste in mouth, intermittent heartburn

thought of the classic definition of a Unitarian:

thought of writing a lesbian novel. I read a great deal of lesbian fiction and nonfiction, some by Marijane Meaker under one name or another. I'm sure I read them in part out of prurient interest, but that's why I initially read John O'Hara, James T. Farrell, and no end of fine writers.

And so we've had another night Of poetry and poses And each man knows he'll be alone When the sacred ginmill closes. —DAVE VAN RONK

not Small Town turns out to be what New Yorkers want to read, it is very definitely the book this New Yorker needed to write. It is, I came to realize, a post-apocalyptic novel set in New York in the summer of 2002. We've had our apocalypse, and we're New Yorkers, and we're moving on.

I don't plan an awful lot in life just as I don't plan an awful lot in my fiction.

Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one.