Lawrence Block famous quotes

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

#Travel #Tourists #Moments

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.
-- Lawrence Block

#Inspirational #Destiny #Discovery

One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing-writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.
-- Lawrence Block

#Morning #Writing #Giving

I wanted a drink. There were a hundred reasons why a man will want a drink, but I wanted one now for the most elementary reason of all. I didn't want to feel what I was feeling, and a voice within was telling me that I needed a drink, that I couldn't bear it without it. But that voice is a liar. You can always bear the pain. It'll hurt, it'll burn like acid in an open wound, but you can stand it. And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.
-- Lawrence Block

#Hurt #Pain #Liars

And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.
-- Lawrence Block

#Pain #Long #Relief

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.
-- Lawrence Block

#Mean #Cat #Elk

I think persistence in the face of adversity is an essential part of a writer’s job description. If you don’t care enough about it to avoid being easily disheartened that way, you really should be doing something else.
-- Lawrence Block

#Jobs #Adversity #Persistence

One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have to be looking for something in order to find something else.
-- Lawrence Block

#Order #Serendipity #Mind

As my late mother famously observed, the one thing to be said for growing old is that every year there are a few more things I don’t have to give a rat’s ***** about.
-- Lawrence Block

#Mother #Years #Giving

I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.
-- Lawrence Block

#Writing #Thinking #Next

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.
-- Lawrence Block

#Way #Exaggeration #My Way

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.
-- Lawrence Block

#New York #Dirty #Home

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.
-- Lawrence Block

#Asking #Pointless

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

#Fiction #Awful #Plans

When you get older, keeping the private stuff private seems less important.
-- Lawrence Block

#Important #Stuff

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.
-- Lawrence Block

#Book #Writing #People

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

#Men #Sick #Ems

Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you'll want on that desert island.
-- Lawrence Block

#War #Book #Islands

I can’t persuade myself that one of the problems facing the planet today might be a shortage of books by me,
-- Lawrence Block

#Book #Might #Today

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.
-- Lawrence Block

#Country #New York #People

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.
-- Lawrence Block

#Lying #Writing #Dark

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.
-- Lawrence Block

#Long #Enough #Persons

Dangerous thing, giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil. And the capacity to make the wrong choice more often than not.
-- Lawrence Block

#Evil #Giving #Choices

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...
-- Lawrence Block

#Writing #Stories #World

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.
-- Lawrence Block

#Needs #Use #Noir

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

#Sex #Young #Booze

I’ve always essentially been a New Yorker,
-- Lawrence Block

If you cannot stand a spoon upright in the cup, then the coffee is too weak.
-- Lawrence Block

#Coffee #Spoons #Cups

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

#Writing #Goes On #Want

Why on earth should I care whether people read me with their eyes or their ears?
-- Lawrence Block

#Eye #People #Ears

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.
-- Lawrence Block

#Nuts #Different #Way

People don't get to change things. Things change people once in a while, but people don't change things.
-- Lawrence Block

#People #Things Change