Come on in,” Elaine said. “She’s already here. Pam, this is Mr. Scudder, Matthew Scudder. Matt, I’d like you to meet Pam.
I don’t know about the rest of the country but in New York more people have learned anonymity from rent control than ever discovered it in a twelve-step program.
If fate sends you a lemon, use it to make lemonade.
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’
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.
If you build a better mousetrap, Nature will build a better mouse.
I’ve tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don’t want to go on.
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.
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.
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.
People don’t get to change things. Things change people once in a while, but people don’t change things.
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...
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.
One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have to be looking for something in order to find something else.
Dangerous thing, giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil. And the capacity to make the wrong choice more often than not.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t plan an awful lot in life just as I don’t plan an awful lot in my fiction.
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.
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.