Lawrence Block

“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've always essentially been a New Yorker.”

“Fuck you! I hope you die!""Everybody Dies," I said. "So fuck you.”

“I really don't write much anymore, and I'm not uncomfortable with that. I've tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don't want to go on.”

“When you get older, keeping the private stuff private seems less important.”

“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.”

“I can't persuade myself that one of the problems facing the planet today might be a shortage of books by me.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Why on earth should I care whether people read me with their eyes or their ears?”

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

“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.”

“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...”

“Forgiving himself came easy to him. His, he'd come to realize, was a forgiving nature.”