Top 182 Quotes & Sayings by Karin Slaughter - Page 2

Women can be two different people - one person at home, another at work.

Most of my books begin with a nap on my couch here, when I dream up characters and story lines, and then I write on my laptop in the recliner and handle the business side of email at my desk, which is sagging in the middle - maybe from so many words?

The most important lesson I have learned from spending years talking to law enforcement officers is that the vast majority of them really want to do a good job. They have a physical need to do a good job. And yet, we don't give them the resources that would help them.

Anyone who's been to high school with teenage girls knows how horrible girls can be.

I've always been drawn to dark stories. I enjoy reading Flannery O'Connor, Patricia Highsmith, and Margaret Mitchell.

If you wear them outside, they stop being pyjamas. I wear mine to the mail box, which is right in front of my house - that's my limit. Anything else is wrong.

Southerners have this love of embellishment. Even when you read a police report, there's some backstory.

Crafting a piece of gripping, narrative true crime that engages the world is not that different from crafting a piece of crime fiction.

I grew up having the library as the best place ever. I spent a lot of weekends there as a kid - my parents would drop me off and leave me there all day. I would just sit in the back and read whatever I could find.

Every writer I know got their start in a library somewhere. We read a book, and we thought, 'I want to do that.'

I grew up in a small town in Georgia where nothing bad happened - it was like Mayberry.

People don't just love mysteries. They are obsessed with them - especially the kind that are never definitively solved.

There's a tendency among some male writers to make the women in their stories weak and needing of rescue so that their hero looks like a manly man.

As awful as crime can be, it's what happens afterward - the struggling to get out of bed, to put one foot in front of the other - that alters people.

When I became a published writer, I said, 'Whatever I can do to help the libraries I want to do,' so all of my book tours since then have involved me coming to a library and talking about how important libraries are for a community.

Growing up in Georgia in the southeastern United States, I was always reading and always kept to myself. I never felt isolated, though; I just liked being alone.

Denise Mina is probably one of the most gifted writers out there, whether it's mystery or literary or whatever label you want to give it.

Equal access to reading is fundamental to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I've never purposefully based a character on any one person I know, but I'm certain there are amalgamations that exist.

I write fifteen hours a day, stopping at Oprah-o'clock.

Random House is definitely invested in keeping libraries healthy.

Reading is exercise for our brains in the guise of pleasure. Books give us insight into other people, other cultures. They make us laugh. They make us think. If they are really good, they make us believe that we are better for having read them.

I think a lot of guys who are on the Internet a lot, they're kind of anesthetized to some of the violent language and all that because they see it all the time.

Reading is power. Reading is life.

I love twins stories.

It's hard because people often don't recognise shyness; they think it's just someone being rude. I have had to work to overcome that, especially if I'm meeting my readers at author events, because I don't want them to think I'm snooty or rude.

It seems like women are always told, 'It is not your time.'

Men are more particular, and they're not going to grab something with a bodice-ripper cover on it.

It's just my goal to deliver the best story I can, and I want to make sure each book is better than the last, and in order to do that, I have to take chances.

I can clearly trace my passion for reading back to the Jonesboro, Georgia, library, where for the first time in my life I had access to what seemed like an unlimited supply of books. This was where I discovered 'Encyclopedia Brown' and 'Nancy Drew,' 'Gone With the Wind' and 'Rebecca.' This was where I became inspired to be a writer.

I think some people are good at being alone, and some people aren't, and as a child, I really liked it.

Oh, I'm completely OCD about neatness.

Jack Reacher is one of the sexiest characters in fiction.

If you're going to write thrillers, you have to make a decision if you are going to be realistic or go off and over.

I always wanted to be a writer. In the beginning, I thought I had to rewrite 'Gone with the Wind,' but eventually, I found my way and realized that wasn't me.

I'm over the word 'like' in conversation, and 'you know' seems to be the placeholder of choice, but when I'm writing dialogue, I tend to use those phrases because that's how people talk.

I thought I had to write literature and add my name to the list of great Southern storytellers. Fortunately for me, no one wanted to read any of those stories. They got rejected by everyone. Sometimes, I would get a note saying they liked the writing, but the story simply didn't work.

I never want to write a book just to tell a story. There is always something deeper going on.

When you grow up starving, you cannot point with pride to a book you've just spent six hours reading. Picking cotton, sewing flour bags into clothes - those were the skills my father grew up appreciating.

Visual storytelling is at once immediate and subversive.

No crime lab in the world looks like the 'CSI' ones because there's simply not the money for all those fancy machines.

If there is still an American dream, reading is one of the bootstraps by which we can all pull ourselves up.

There aren't many people in the world who can say that they are doing the job they've wanted to do since childhood, so in that regard, I feel incredibly fortunate.

If I wasn't a writer, I would probably be a watchmaker. I like putting puzzles together, and that is what a watch is, figuring out how all the gears and everything else works together. I'm patient and good at focusing on a single task.

I am hard-pressed to find a successful writer who doesn't have a similar story to mine - transformation through the public library.

As voters and taxpayers, we must demand that our local governments properly prioritize libraries. As citizens, we must invest in our library down the street so that the generations served by that library grow up to be adults who contribute not just to their local communities but to the world.

Women know how to scare other women.

For many children, the library represents their only access to books, reading, and the Internet outside of their home. If you think about how far behind a child would be without access to these fundamental tools - tools that are vital to successful employment later in life - it's a travesty.

'Encyclopedia Brown Takes the Case,' 'The Secret of the Old Clock,' 'Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret,' 'Flowers in the Attic,' 'Gone With the Wind' - these are the books that defined my childhood. They thrilled me. They made me feel like I wasn't alone in the world.

I'm going to name a name: Janet Evanovich. She writes the same book over and over, and I read every single one of them and eagerly anticipate them.

Though he was not a reader himself, my father understood that reading is not just an escape. It is access to a better way of life.

Librarians have always stood up for writers and readers in every kind of community across this country.

We make assumptions: nurses should be nice, teachers should be good. But everyone has a dark side, some darker than others.

I grew up reading thrillers. Honestly, I was always drawn to the very detailed ones like Patricia Cornwell. I love details.

Usually, when inspiration strikes late, the light of day reveals that I haven't gotten an idea for a book so much as a psychiatric case study.

I busted my chin open trying to be Evel Knievel on my bike. When it happened, you could see straight through to the bone, I thought my dad was going to pass out. It left a scar that I still have now.

I think chalking up human behavior to evil lets us all off the hook too easily.

As the youngest of three girls, most of my childhood works were revenge fantasies against my older sisters, so of course the sisters in 'Pretty Girls' share some similarities to my own.

I love reading almost as much as I love writing.

I started Save the Libraries in 2010 by hosting a big fundraiser in my city library of DeKalb County in Atlanta. Through that, I learned that even with fundraisers, libraries often don't make money - they just barely break even.