Dennis Lehane Quotes

There's something ugly about the flawless.

Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That's how you focus the world. It's the only reason you should ever try this writing job.

In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.

Happiness comes in moments, & then it's gone until the next time. Could be years. But sadness settles it.

It's hard to close the door on optimistic expectations when you love someone.

There are so many more important things to worry about than how you're perceived by strangers.

The foundation of your life is luck. Hard work and talent make up the difference.

There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.

Chuck said, “Hey. How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Cawley looked over at him. “I’ll bite. How many?” “Fish,” Chuck said and let loose a bright bark of a laugh.

What molds us is what maims us.

Catch me on a good day, I think half of my books aren't too bad. Catch me on a bad day, I think I've never written a good line.

The best thing that can happen to people entering creative professions is the dwindling of all other possibilities.

This world can only give me reminders of what I don't have, can never have, didn't have for long enough.

It's good not only to realize that you can't please all of the people all of the time, but that you don't want to. There's a certain type of reader that you don't ever want to write for.

I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chauffeur - do whatever it took. But from the moment I took my first writing workshop, I was a writer.

And he hated himself and hated her,too, for the ruin they'd made of each other.

I normally can't stand vice-free people. They conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority. Plus, they suck the life right out of a party.

I love to write, so it rarely seems like work - even when it gets arduous.

The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.

The world according to Bubba is simple - if it aggravates you, stop it. By whatever means necessary.

Do you know the primary difference between men and gods? ... Gods don’t think they can become men

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

It's very simple. If you learn how to write well, to write with depth, cream will rise to the top. You'll get published. But, there is no secret.

Grief, I swear to God, doesn't live in the heart. It lives in the senses. And sometimes, all I want to do is cut off my nose so I can't smell her, hack my fingers off at the joint.

I won the parental lottery. Most of the kids I grew up with either came from really fractured homes, or really violent ones. I went home to a very traditional, good Irish Catholic family.

How many psychiatrists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” “I don’t know. How many?” “Eight.” “Why?” “Oh, stop overanalyzing it.

Choice, I've always believed, is all that separates us from animals.

Whatever she saw beyond the camera lens, beyond the photographer, beyond anything in the known world probably - wasn't fit to be seen.

I sort of play golf because a lot of my friends are into it, but I'm awful - my handicap is about six or seven thousand.

The loneliness of another can be shocking when it lays itself bare without warning.

What's your name?" "Emma Gould," she said. "What's yours?" "Wanted." "By all the girls or just the law?

I held her, he wanted to say, and if I knew for certain that all it would take to hold her again would be to die, then I couldn't raise the gun to my head fast enough.

Patrick Kenzie asking a bemused waitress for a newspaper in smalltown USA. 'It's like a homepage without a scroll button?'

Which would be worse - to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?

I was blessed to grow up in really interesting times and to go back to a home where I was very safe.

You've learned that every good lie is threaded with truth and every accepted truth leaks lies.

He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.

... scarred by wisdom she'd never asked for.

That's the thing about being a victim; you start to think it'll happen to you on a regular basis. It's living with the reality of your own vulnerability, and it sucks.

Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences.

I loved this woman the way you love ... well, nothing," he said, a note of suprise in his voice. "You can’t compare that kind of love to anything, can you? It’s its own unique gift.

Everyone sees different things.

How am I supposed to let you go, that's all I'm asking. I want to hold you again, smell you, and, yes too, I just want you to fade. To please, please fade.

I love television. I think we're in a renaissance of epic proportion in television now.

Maybe there are some things we were put on this earth not to know.

Or maybe I'd do what I always do - hang out and see what develops. Fatalist to the core.

The ornament of beauty, Shakespeare wrote, is suspect. And he was right. But beauty itself, unadorned and unaffected, is sacred, I think, worthy of our awe and our loyalty.

Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.

Grief, he said, is carnivorous.

One that society can't forgive, but I can.