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. ”

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 was blessed to grow up in really interesting times and to go back to a home where I was very safe. ”

I love to write, so it rarely seems like work - even when it gets arduous. ”

Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

The best thing that can happen to people entering creative professions is the dwindling of all other possibilities. ”