Laura Lippman quotes:

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.

Anyone can love a perfect place. Loving Baltimore takes some resilience.

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.

...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.

My family is really, really Southern - I had two uncle Bubbas, and grandparents that we called Big Mama and Big Daddy.

I'm at the age most people are sending their kids off to college.

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.

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.

stinginess seemed instinctive to him. Darwinian even. He hadn't gotten to his current size by sharing.

Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.

Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for.

The competition for the future of crime fiction is fierce, as it should be, but don't take your eyes off Craig McDonald. He's wily, talented and-rarest of the rare-a true original. He writes melancholy poetry that actually has melancholy poets wandering around, but don't turn your backs on them, either. I am always eager to see what he's going to do next.

There was nothing more dangerous than people convinced of their own good intentions.

I adore the work of Stephen Sondheim. I like musicales in general. They make surprisingly great running tapes.

I carry in my datebook a piece of paper that my mother copied out for me, from the 1840 Census. Hardy Callaway Culver of Hancock County, Georgia, had 42 slaves, 31 "employed in agriculture." Culver was my great-great-great grandfather. I carry this piece of paper with me every day because I don't want to forget. I don't know what to do with the information, but I don't want to forget it.

it's smarter to be lucky than it's lucky to be smart.

I've gotten to do a lot of stuff, traveled, worked hard at my career.

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.

She was only beginning to grasp the geometry lessons that had perplexed her in junior high, the revelation that the world was full of infinite planes that never intersect."

The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been.

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.

Children can be happy when their parents are miserable. But a parent is never happier than her unhappiest child.

how magnanimous was a gesture if one were constantly aware of its magnanimity?

I begin each book with a challenge to myself.

I had ancestors who were slave-holders, which is a difficult piece of family history to say the least. In a recent New York Times article on the subject of modern attitudes toward our slave-holding past, the writer noted that we all want to be from "innocent origins." I _know_ I'm not. Then again, I suspect most of us are not.

I like to see writers reach bigger and bigger audiences, and stand-alones have allowed some of them to do just that.

I'm a morning person, which is a hideous thing to be. No one likes morning people, not even other morning people.

I'm for anything that lets writers stretch, in or out of their series.

In fact, I think every book I've written has been inspired by a real event.

It's very different to have this kid that I'm truly responsible for.

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 with a license to carry, and a girl could more than get by in this life.

There are, of course, an infinite number of places where one is not, yet only one place where one actually is.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's a serendipity to real life that the Internet can't duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the one you were looking for, and it's that book that changes your life.