Top 70 Lawrence Block Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.”

— Lawrence Block

4. “If you build a better mousetrap, Nature will build a better mouse.”

— Lawrence Block

5. “Dangerous thing, giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil. And the capacity to make the wrong choice more often than not.”

— Lawrence Block

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

— Lawrence Block

7. “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.”

— Lawrence Block

8. “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.”

— Lawrence Block

9. “As my grandmother used to say, if you’ve got nothing good to say about someone, let’s hear it.”

— Lawrence Block

10. “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

11. “If you cannot stand a spoon upright in the cup, then the coffee is too weak.”

— Lawrence Block

12. “Ideas come to people who are receptive to them.”

— Lawrence Block

13. “WHEN you hit a gay bar in the middle of a weekday afternoon you wonder why they don’t call it something else.”

— Lawrence Block

14. “I see,” I said, which is something I very often say when I don’t.”

— Lawrence Block

15. “People don’t get to change things. Things change people once in a while, but people don’t change things.”

— Lawrence Block

16. “Sometimes it’s a dog-eat-dog world and the rest of the time it’s the other way around.”

— Lawrence Block

17. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to know God’s will. You just wait and see what happens, and that’s it.”

— Lawrence Block

18. “Being broke is not a crime, nor is it proof of one’s inadequacy as a writer or as a human being. If you go around with an attitude of implicit apology for being temporarily without funds, it’s going to do you more harm than good.”

— Lawrence Block

19. “The moving finger writes, and having writ Moves on. Nor all your piety and wit Can call it back to cancel half a line Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.”

— Lawrence Block

20. “I find him whelming, personally. Neither overwhelming nor underwhelming but somewhere in the middle.”

— Lawrence Block

21. “And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.”

— Lawrence Block

22. “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.”

— Lawrence Block

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

— Lawrence Block

24. “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

25. “Tomorrow’s always there, just over the horizon. Until the tomorrows run out.”

— Lawrence Block

26. “When someone put money in your hand you closed your fingers around it and put it in your pocket.”

— Lawrence Block

27. “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

28. “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

29. “Life, I’d heard someone say, is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. It seemed to me that it was both at once, even for those of us who don’t do much of either.”

— Lawrence Block

30. “Fiction writing starts off by requiring the towering arrogance that enables one to sit down at the typewriter in the belief that someone somewhere will actually be eager to read the productions of our own private imaginations. But that arrogance must be buffered by the humility that leads us to learn our craft and strive to make our work comprehensible and inviting and accessible to the reader.”

— Lawrence Block

31. “People go through changes and life does the damnedest things to us all.”

— Lawrence Block

32. “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’”

— Lawrence Block

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

36. “Take care. It seems to me that people have only been saying that phrase on parting for the past few years or so. All of a sudden everyone started to say it, as if the whole country abruptly recognized that ours is a world which demands caution.”

— Lawrence Block

37. “Come on in,” Elaine said. “She’s already here. Pam, this is Mr. Scudder, Matthew Scudder. Matt, I’d like you to meet Pam.”

— Lawrence Block

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

— Lawrence Block

39. “You know what I realized?” “What?” “Most of the people I know are dead. I guess that happens.”

— Lawrence Block

40. “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 ass about.”

— Lawrence Block

41. “I rode to the fourth floor, poked around until I found the stairway, and walked down a flight. I almost always do this and I sometimes wonder why. I think someone must have done it in a movie once and I was evidently impressed, but it’s really a waste of time, especially when the elevator in question is self-service.”

— Lawrence Block

42. “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

43. “But whenever there’s the right kind of nut making headlines, a Slasher or an Icepick Prowler, a certain number of people get pistol permits and a certain number of others buy illegal guns. Then some of them get drunk and shoot their wives. None of them ever seems to wind up nailing the Slasher. I.”

— Lawrence Block

44. “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

45. “You got to ask a street question to get a street answer.”

— Lawrence Block

46. “While at SMLA, I wrote a science fiction short-short called “Make A Prison.” It worked its way all the way down to the very bottom of the S-F food chain, finally selling to Bob Lowndes at Original Science Fiction Stories for a half cent a word, then wound up in Judith Merril’s prestigious annual anthology. I was elated – but I never wrote another piece of science fiction.”

— Lawrence Block

47. “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

48. “I told Carolyn it was a great day for running, and she told me there was no such thing.”

— Lawrence Block

49. “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

50. “He was always inclined to be a moody man, very exuberant when things were going right, very depressed when they weren’t.”

— Lawrence Block