Dennis Lehane
Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That's how you focus the world. It's the only reason you should ever try this writing job.
The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.
I sort of play golf because a lot of my friends are into it, but I'm awful - my handicap is about six or seven thousand.
I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic - hyper-realistic - stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn't meld the two.
Catch me on a good day, I think half of my books aren't too bad. Catch me on a bad day, I think I've never written a good line.
I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.
I have a lot of rage about things that didn't happen to me, tied up with watching an immigrant, working-class father struggle to make his way through the world - and seeing how society was modeled to keep him in his place.
I won the parental lottery. Most of the kids I grew up with either came from really fractured homes, or really violent ones. I went home to a very traditional, good Irish Catholic family.
The best thing that can happen to people entering creative professions is the dwindling of all other possibilities.
Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.
It's good not only to realize that you can't please all of the people all of the time, but that you don't want to. There's a certain type of reader that you don't ever want to write for.
I was blessed to grow up in really interesting times and to go back to a home where I was very safe.
I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chauffeur - do whatever it took. But from the moment I took my first writing workshop, I was a writer.
I love to write, so it rarely seems like work - even when it gets arduous.
Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.Collection: Lying
There's something ugly about the flawless.Collection: Ugly
She smiled darkly and shook her head. 'I'm not crazy. I'm not. Of course what else would a crazy person claim? That's the Kafkaesque genius of it all. If you're not crazy but people have told the world you are, then all your protests to the contrary just underscore their point. Do you see what I'm saying?Collection: Crazy
He wanted to ask her what sound a heart made when it broke from pleasure, when just the sight of someone filled you the way food, blood, and air never could, when you felt as if you'd been born for only one moment and this, for whatever reason, was it.Collection: Love
In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.Collection: Fall
Your first family is your blood family and you always be true to that. That means something. But there's another family and that's the kind you go out and find. Maybe even by accident sometimes. And they're as much blood as your first family. Maybe more so, because they don't have to look out for you and they don't have to love you. They choose to.Collection: Love You
There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.Collection: Thread
Grief, he said, is carnivorous.Collection: Grief
It's hard to close the door on optimistic expectations when you love someone.Collection: Optimistic
The foundation of your life is luck. Hard work and talent make up the difference.Collection: Hard Work
There are so many more important things to worry about than how you're perceived by strangers.Collection: Self Esteem
Happiness comes in moments, & then it's gone until the next time. Could be years. But sadness settles it.Collection: Sadness
I normally can't stand vice-free people. They conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority. Plus, they suck the life right out of a party.Collection: Party
This world can only give me reminders of what I don't have, can never have, didn't have for long enough.Collection: Long
Maybe there are some things we were put on this earth not to know.Collection: Earth
Do you know the primary difference between men and gods? ... Gods don’t think they can become menCollection: Men
She was afraid of all that and so much more, but what terrified her most was inside of her, an insect of unnatural intelligence who’d been living in her brain her entire life, playing with it, clicking across it, wrenching loose its cables on a whim.Collection: Brain
It had occurred to Sean once - on a bender about ten years before with some buddies, Sean and a bloodstream full of bourbon turning philosophical - that maybe they HAD gotten in that car. All three of them. And what they now thought of as their life was just a dream state. That all three of them were, in reality, still eleven-year-old boys trapped in some cellar, imagining what they'd become if they ever escaped and grew up.Collection: Dream
We were supposed to grow old together, Dolores. Have kids. Take walks under old trees. I wanted to watch the lines etch themselves into your flesh and know when each and every one of them appeared. Die together.Collection: Kids
My daughter squealed again and both Bubba and I winced. It’s not an attractive sound, that. It’s high-pitched and it enters your ear canals like hot glass. No matter how much I love my daughter, I will never love her squealing. Or maybe I will. Maybe I do. Driving down 93, I realized once and for all, that I love the things that chafe. The things that fill me with stress so total I can’t remember when a block of it didn’t rest on top of my heart. I love what, if broken, can’t be repaired. What, if lost can’t be replaced. I love my burdens.Collection: Daughter
Believe it or not, Marshal, I believe in talk therapy, basic interpersonal skills. I have this radical idea that if you treat a patient with respect and listen to what he's trying to tell you, you just might reach him. (87)Collection: Believe
The loneliness of another can be shocking when it lays itself bare without warning.Collection: Loneliness
Whatever she saw beyond the camera lens, beyond the photographer, beyond anything in the known world probably - wasn't fit to be seen.Collection: Saws
And he hated himself and hated her,too, for the ruin they'd made of each other.Collection: Lost Love
You've learned that every good lie is threaded with truth and every accepted truth leaks lies.Collection: Lying
L.A. burns, and so many other cities smolder, waiting for the hose that will flood gasoline over the coals, and we listen to politicians who fuel our hate and our narrow views and tell us it's simply a matter of getting back to basics while they sit in their beachfront properties and listen to the surf so they won't have to hear the screams of the drowning.Collection: Hate
And often the worst thing wasn't the victims--they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen. (Mystic River)Collection: Pain
A pretty face had been damaged by acne scars and she wore and extra forty pounds on her frame like a threat. Her eyes were dull with anger disguised as apathy. If she kept on her current path, she'd grow into the type of person who fed her kids Doritos for breakfast and purchased angry bumper stickers with lots of exclamation points. But right now, she was just another in a long line of pissed-off small-town girls with a shitty outlook.Collection: Girl
How many psychiatrists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” “I don’t know. How many?” “Eight.” “Why?” “Oh, stop overanalyzing it.Collection: Eight
Do you honestly think Lenin is any different from J.P. Morgan? That you, if you were given absolute power, would behave any differently? Do you know the primary difference between men and gods?...Gods don't think they can become men.Collection: Men
Chuck said, “Hey. How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Cawley looked over at him. “I’ll bite. How many?” “Fish,” Chuck said and let loose a bright bark of a laugh.Collection: Laughing
What's your name?" "Emma Gould," she said. "What's yours?" "Wanted." "By all the girls or just the law?Collection: Girl
Vanity is a weakness. I know this. It's a shallow dependence on the exterior self, on how one looks instead of what one is. I know this well... Vanity and dishonesty may be vices, but they're also the first forms of protection I ever knew.Collection: Vanity
Visitation Street is urban opera writ large. Gritty and magical, filled with mystery, poetry and pain, Ivy Pochoda’s voice recalls Richard Price, Junot Diaz, and even Alice Sebold, yet it’s indelibly her own.Collection: Pain
Patrick Kenzie asking a bemused waitress for a newspaper in smalltown USA. 'It's like a homepage without a scroll button?'Collection: Usa
Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences.Collection: Luxury