Top 70 Robert B. Parker Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Writer’s block? I’ve never heard of a plumber complain about plumber’s block.”

— Robert B. Parker

2. “I heard somebody define heaven once,” she said, looking at Pearl, “as a place where, when you get there, all the dogs you ever loved run to greet you.”

— Robert B. Parker

3. “Because I love you,” I said. “Because you are in my life like the music at the edge of silence.”

— Robert B. Parker

4. “If you are going to live life on your own terms, there need to be terms, and somehow you need to live up to them.”

— Robert B. Parker

5. “I had achieved the most important things in my life when I married Joan and had the sons. Given the choice between Joan and the boys, and being a writer, I world give up being a writer without a blink.”

— Robert B. Parker

6. “Well, you give me too much credit for foresight and planning. I haven’t got a clue what the hell I’m doing.”

— Robert B. Parker

7. “For David Parker and Daniel Parker, with the respect and admiration of their father, who grew up with them.”

— Robert B. Parker

8. “You do the best you can and you deal with the consequences. It’s all there is.”

— Robert B. Parker

9. “I needed to find my way to write. I need about six hours of uninterrupted time in order to produce about two hours of writing, and when I accepted that and found the way to do it, then I was able to write.”

— Robert B. Parker

10. “I really don’t know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!”

— Robert B. Parker

11. “I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don’t know.”

— Robert B. Parker

12. “College had little effect on me. I’d have been the same writer if I’d gone to MIT, except I’d have flunked out sooner.”

— Robert B. Parker

13. “If you want to write, write it. That’s the first rule. And send it in, and send it in to someone who can publish it or get it published. Don’t send it to me. Don’t show it to your spouse, or your significant other, or your parents, or somebody. They’re not going to publish it.”

— Robert B. Parker

14. “Fourteen years in the professor dodge has taught me that one can argue ingeniously on behalf of any theory, applied to any piece of literature. This is rarely harmful, because normally no-one reads such essays.”

— Robert B. Parker

15. “Loss is the price we pay for progress,” she said. “Only as we leave things behind do we move forward.”

— Robert B. Parker

16. “Teaching is too strong a word for whatever it was I did at Northeastern University.”

— Robert B. Parker

17. “The evening stretches out against the sky, I thought. Like a patient etherized upon a table. I grinned to myself. Live fast, die young, and have a literate corpse.”

— Robert B. Parker

18. “The key to growing up well, is being tough enough.”

— Robert B. Parker

19. “Being a professor and working are not the same thing. The academic community is composed largely of nitwits. If I may generalize. People who don’t know very much about what matters very much, who view life through literature rather than the other way around.”

— Robert B. Parker

20. “What if you could be young again and were able to undo the things that were done that made you into the person you would later become. But then who would you be.”

— Robert B. Parker

21. “There’s something about being able to literally consume a work of art – then to divide all that pleasure of it – because it’s a memory. A great wine for me is a memory, it’s an extraordinary experience.”

— Robert B. Parker

22. “Coincidence exists, but believing in it never did me any good.”

— Robert B. Parker

23. “Joan organizes our social life, and on weekends I follow her around.”

— Robert B. Parker

24. “Vinnie and Hawk lounged in the theater lobby, blending in to the theatrical scene like two coyotes at a poultry festival.”

— Robert B. Parker

25. “She was wearing something in purple suede that was too short for a skirt and too long for a belt.”

— Robert B. Parker

26. “I think at this stage in my life I have learned that there are any number of things that men will never know, and can never hope to know, about women.”

— Robert B. Parker

27. “Halfway through my steak I caught sight of myself in the mirror behind the bar. I looked like someone who ought to eat alone. I didn’t look in the mirror again.”

— Robert B. Parker

28. “I was on the Oprah Winfrey Show once. It was a really slow news day for Oprah, and there were several of us on ’cause none of us was sufficiently interesting by his or herself.”

— Robert B. Parker

29. “Her toenails were painted. It didn’t help much. Never saw a toenail I liked.”

— Robert B. Parker

30. “Tough is what you do, more than it is how you feel about it before or after,” I said. “You’re tough enough.”

— Robert B. Parker

31. “Very few of my books are about who stole the Maltese Falcon.”

— Robert B. Parker

32. “There can never be any substitute for your own palate nor any better education than tasting the wine yourself.”

— Robert B. Parker

33. “I write five pages a day. If you would read five pages a day, we’d stay right even.”

— Robert B. Parker

34. “Sartre claimed that hell is other people,” I said. “He never saw no TV game show,” Hawk said.”

— Robert B. Parker

35. “Businessmen learn the way businessmen are supposed to be. Professors learn the way professors are supposed to be. Construction workers learn how construction workers are supposed to be. They spend their lives trying to be what they’re supposed to be and being scared they aren’t. Quiet desperation.”

— Robert B. Parker

36. “But if I were a man,” she said, “I imagine you wouldn’t let me say it.” “No,” I said. “If I didn’t need your help, I wouldn’t let you say it.”

— Robert B. Parker

37. “The best moments in my life,” I said, “have come because I loved somebody.” “Yeah,” he said. “And the worst,” I said.”

— Robert B. Parker

38. “Too much positive is either scared or stupid or both. Reality is uncertain.”

— Robert B. Parker

39. “Even in her cap and gown Susan looked like a sunrise, extravagant and full of promise. Wherever she went things seemed, as they always did, to organize around her.”

— Robert B. Parker

40. “So far so good. I had a recently widowed mother and her orphaned son crying hysterically. Maybe for an encore I could shoot the family dog.”

— Robert B. Parker

41. “What was that line from Hemingway? What’s right is what feels good after? That didn’t help. I took a long drink of Scotch and soda. There was that line from who, Auden? Malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man.”

— Robert B. Parker

42. “None of us offered to shake hands. There was no advantage to letting somebody get hold of you.”

— Robert B. Parker

43. “We split a bottle of Norman cider. Not everybody sells Norman cider by the bottle. “Has a European feel” Susan said. “That sounds terrific” I said. “Can I have one?” Susan grinned at me. “How did you ever get to be so big without growing up?” she said. “Iron self-control” I said.”

— Robert B. Parker

44. “There is excitement in a new kiss, but there is a quality of memory and intimacy in kissing someone you’ve kissed often before. I.”

— Robert B. Parker

45. “This is not a screenplay. I don’t do twenty drafts. I’m not going to show this to you until it’s published or accepted for publication. You can make whatever suggestions you want, but I probably will ignore them entirely.”

— Robert B. Parker

46. “Shopping is never over,” Susan said. “It is merely suspended.”

— Robert B. Parker

47. “Susan said. “Kindness is not dangerous. You have found a way to work and live which allows you to integrate the violence and the compassion. If you had no impulse to violence, your compassion wouldn’t be so admirable. If you had no compassion, your violence would be intolerable. You understand what I’m saying?”

— Robert B. Parker

48. “I liked the myth elements of Christmas. The way in which its origins reach back far beyond Jesus, to the rituals of people unknown to us. The celebration of the winter solstice. The coming of light in the darkest time.”

— Robert B. Parker

49. “I’m entirely fascinated with you,” I said. “And what you are is a result of what you were, including the other men.”

— Robert B. Parker

50. “There stirred behind her face a sense of life and purpose and mirth and caring that made her seem to be in motion even as she was still. There was a kind of rhythm to her, even in motionless repose. I said, “Energy contained by grace, maybe.”

— Robert B. Parker