Laura Lippman Quotes
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In fact, I think every book I've written has been inspired by a real event.
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stinginess seemed instinctive to him. Darwinian even. He hadn't gotten to his current size by sharing.
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Reporting is pretty vital to me. It keeps me connected to the world. A 40-hour-per-week day job may be less feasible as time goes on.
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...Baltimore. It's imperfect. Boy, is it imperfect. And there are parts of its past that make you wince. It's not all marble steps and waitresses calling you 'hon,' you know. Racial strife in the sixties, the riots during the Civil War. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was civilized and gay, rotted and polite. The terms are slightly anachronistic now, but I think he was essentially right.
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But you were a goody-goody, you said.' 'Even goody-goodies think about such things. In fact, I would say that's what defines us. We're always thinking about the things we don't dare do, figuring out where the lines are drawn, so we can go right up to the edge of things, then plead innocence on the ground of a technicality.
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There was nothing more dangerous than people convinced of their own good intentions.
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There are, of course, an infinite number of places where one is not, yet only one place where one actually is.
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I'm a morning person, which is a hideous thing to be. No one likes morning people, not even other morning people.
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I think I'm part of a generation of crime writers all of whom woke up independently and recoiled with horror at the fact that we'd chosen this very conservative genre.
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I like to see writers reach bigger and bigger audiences, and stand-alones have allowed some of them to do just that.
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Anyone can love a perfect place. Loving Baltimore takes some resilience.
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As for music, my tastes are eclectic. Elvis Costello is my all-time favorite. I listen to a lot of jazz, primarily the great female vocalists, and I am very fond of the late cabaret singer Nancy Lamott.
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It's very different to have this kid that I'm truly responsible for.
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Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for.
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I begin each book with a challenge to myself.
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My family is really, really Southern - I had two uncle Bubbas, and grandparents that we called Big Mama and Big Daddy.
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It must be nice to be so strong and to think it's because you're so good, that you live right and eat right, so you deserve your health and happiness. But there is such a thing as luck, and there's more bad luck than good in this world.
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Children can be happy when their parents are miserable. But a parent is never happier than her unhappiest child.
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it's smarter to be lucky than it's lucky to be smart.
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I think Baltimore suffers from nostalgia and it keeps us from being honest in talking about what really happened here. A place doesn't have to be perfect to be beloved, and I love this city and I love it better for seeing its flaws.
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I've gotten to do a lot of stuff, traveled, worked hard at my career.
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I adore the work of Stephen Sondheim. I like musicales in general. They make surprisingly great running tapes.
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Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.
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We become comfortable saying that there's nothing new, and then something like Malarky comes along, which is new and old and different and familiar, but ultimately itself, comfortable in its own skin, wise and smart and crazy-sexy or maybe sexy-crazy-well, you just have to read it to understand. It's a novel that sets its own course, sure and steady, even when it seems like it might be about to go over the edge of the world.
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There's always time to read. Don't trust a writer who doesn't read. It's like eating food prepared by a cook who doesn't eat.
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There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again.
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I'm for anything that lets writers stretch, in or out of their series.
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Would-be novelists need to bring equal parts arrogance and ignorance to the task before them. The arrogance is almost self-explanatory. Walk into any bookstore or library, calculate how many lifetimes the average person would need to read all the fiction contained therein. To think that one has anything to contribute, to any genre or tradition, takes genuine hubris.
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I'm at the age most people are sending their kids off to college.
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She might not be as strong as everyone she met, or as fast, or even as smart. But she could bullshit with the best of them. Combine that quality with a license to carry, and a girl could more than get by in this life.
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