Dennis Lehane Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Hate came in a maelstrom, and we called it several things—racism, pedophilia, justice, righteousness—but all those words were just ribbons and wrapping paper on a soiled gift that no one wanted to open.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.
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I was blessed to grow up in really interesting times and to go back to a home where I was very safe.
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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.
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The best thing that can happen to people entering creative professions is the dwindling of all other possibilities.
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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.
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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.
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I love to write, so it rarely seems like work - even when it gets arduous.
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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.
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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.
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I'm a detective, but nuns could stonewall Sam Spade into an asylum.