Quote

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

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Lawrence Block
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 24
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Buffalo
New York
Chip Harrison
Paul Kavanagh
Lee Duncan
Sheldon Lord
Giving
Five
Following
Writing
Lost
Pages
Thing
Write
Tears
Going
Helping
Took
Tearing
Always
Tell
Behinds
Tear
Would
Give
Behind
Permission
Nothing
Leave
Badly
Matter
Morning
Helps

More quotes by Lawrence Block

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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.
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Dangerous thing, giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil. And the capacity to make the wrong choice more often than not.
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One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have to be looking for something in order to find something else.
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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.
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Why on earth should I care whether people read me with their eyes or their ears?
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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.
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I’ve tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don’t want to go on.
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Ideas come to people who are receptive to them.
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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.
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If you build a better mousetrap, Nature will build a better mouse.
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And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If fate sends you a lemon, use it to make lemonade.
Lawrence Block
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I don't plan an awful lot in life just as I don't plan an awful lot in my fiction.
Lawrence Block
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Stories are like assholes. Everybody's got one and most of 'em stink.
Lawrence Block
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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
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Man, I so sick of dinosaurs. They wasn't extinct, I'd go out an' kill 'em myself.
Lawrence Block