Lawrence Block Quotes
Serendipity. Look for something, find something else, and realize that what you've found is more suited to your needs than what you thought you were looking for.
Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.
It's the easiest thing in the world to know God's will. You just wait and see what happens, and that's it.
The less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do.
I can't persuade myself that one of the problems facing the planet today might be a shortage of books by me.
I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.
Every year there's a few more things I'm not sure of. I've decided that a wide-ranging uncertainty is the mark of the true maturity of man.
Something I learned long ago. It is not necessary to know what a person is afraid of. It is enough to know the person is afraid.
One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have to be looking for something in order to find something else.
People don't get to change things. Things change people once in a while, but people don't change things.
And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don’t want to go on.
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.
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.
Dangerous thing, giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil. And the capacity to make the wrong choice more often than not.
If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.
As a friend of mine, herself a writer, says, 'People who spend the most meaningful hours of their lives in the exclusive company of imaginary people are apt to be a little strange'
The New Your energy goes beyond anything you'll find anywhere else. It's too much for some people and it grinds them down, but it lifts up and animates the rest of us.
Forgiving himself came easy to him. His, he'd come to realize, was a forgiving nature.