Lawrence Block Quotes - Page 2

I haven't got anything against cats. I haven't got anything against elk either, but that doesn't mean I'm going to keep one in the store so I'll have a place to hang my hat.

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.

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

Man, I so sick of dinosaurs. They wasn't extinct, I'd go out an' kill 'em myself.

I wouldn't presume to define noir - if we could define it, we wouldn't need to use a French word for it - but it seems to me it's more a way of looking at the world than what one sees.

New York is an ugly city, a dirty city... But there is one thing about it. Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.

Asking me why I did or didn't do anything is generally pointless. How do I know? And asking me what I'll do in the future is even less rewarding.

To say I drank my way into marriage isn't much of an exaggeration, and it's none at all to say I drank my way out of it.

Stories are like assholes. Everybody's got one and most of 'em stink.

I've always essentially been a New Yorker.

Everybody's weird, fundamentally everybody is a snap. Sometimes it's a sexual thing and sometimes it's a different kind of weirdness, but one way or another everybody's nuts.

I don't know about the rest of the country but in New York more people have learned anonymity from rent control than ever discovered it in a twelve-step program.

Back then, before it became clear that democracy was best served by a drunken electorate, the bars in New York City were required to close on Election Day.

If fate sends you a lemon, use it to make lemonade.

I’ve tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don’t want to go on.

Booze and tobacco and lots of sex. It keeps a lad young.

My mother's father was from Sligo, and he used to say it was the hardest thing in the world to find a man alive in Dublin who wasn't in the GPO during the Easter Rising. Twenty brave men marched into that post office, he said, and thirty thousand marched out.