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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.

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
Stories
Literary
Littles
Precious
Today
Labor
Little
Short
Writing
Economic
Love
Story
Perforce
World
Point
Incentive
Write
Incentives

More quotes by Lawrence Block

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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
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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.
Lawrence Block
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I've always essentially been a New Yorker.
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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Dangerous thing, giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil. And the capacity to make the wrong choice more often than not.
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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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
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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
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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.
Lawrence Block
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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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Ideas come to people who are receptive to them.
Lawrence Block
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Why on earth should I care whether people read me with their eyes or their ears?
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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And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.
Lawrence Block
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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.
Lawrence Block
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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.
Lawrence Block
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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.
Lawrence Block
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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.
Lawrence Block
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If fate sends you a lemon, use it to make lemonade.
Lawrence Block
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If you build a better mousetrap, Nature will build a better mouse.
Lawrence Block