Top 23 Quotes & Sayings by Nancy Pickard

It's such a joy to talk to a roomful of people who have read my novel and are eager to talk about it.

I live in a little suburb close to Kansas City called Prairie Village, where there's a feeling of everybody knowing everybody else. I think the same thing is true of New York City, by the way.

I go for drives in the Flint Hills, which is the setting for 'The Virgin of Small Plains'.

I often feel like not writing! Sometimes I overcome it by just sitting there until writing happens. Sometimes I don't write, because books often need periods of percolation.

Everybody knows now that Marie Lightfoot, the true crime writer, is dating Franklin DeWeese, the state attorney of Howard County, Florida. They know I'm a white woman; they know he's a black man. That's not news anymore.

I love the unexplainable. It would be so boring to me if everything could be explained.

Being a writer - even a best-selling one - is usually not anywhere near as public as being a movie star, at least not when I'm out in 'real life' like this. Not that I don't use what fame I have, every chance I get, to help sell more books.

Poisonous frogs feast on insects that don't even have names. Tropical lizards disappear into the cracks of trees whose branches spread out as wide as their trunks climb high. This is the real Florida, as it was before people, and probably will be after us, too.

I've lived in Kansas for more than thirty years, and for half of those, I was part of a ranching family, so I'm writing about things I know and love.

I'm Marie Lightfoot, or at least that's the name my publisher puts on the covers of the books I write about true crime. In classic 'true crime' fashion, my latest one is titled 'Anything to Be Together.'

I'm a Midwestern girl, born and bred. It's harder for some of us to write about things closer to home. It's not so much a fear of telling the truth but wanting to do it justice.

I'm not interested in forcing my beliefs on my readers.

I've known a lot of cowboys and a few cowgirls. They're, by and large, some of the smartest, funniest, most courteous, generous, and hardest-working people you'd ever want to know.

Where there are problems, there are angels hovering about just waiting for us to ask them to help us transform our suffering into blessings. I'm not being religious, I'm telling you the truth as I have experienced it. ... And I'm not being trendy either. I was talking to angels long before they got fashionable. ... So maybe you don't believe in angels, that's all right, they don't care. They're not like Tinkerbell, you know, they don't depend on your faith to exist. A lot of people didn't believe the earth was round either, but that didn't make it any flatter.

New York was an idea, I thought, an idea held simultaneously by thirteen million people.

It's dangerous to start attributing your fortunes to luck and your misfortunes to fate.

God is a name we give to love.

History is the study of lies, anyway, because no witness ever recalls events with total accuracy, not even eyewitnesses.

Welcome to New York, where everybody's a stranger, and nobody is.

It was at our library that I found Nancy Drew and fell in love with the genre. I've been grateful ever since for those tolerant, book-loving librarians who allowed a child like me to read what I wanted to read.

If you have a dream of writing, that's wishful thinking. If you have a commitment to writing, that's the way to make your dreams come true.

New York City was the world's biggest vibrator. Everything vibrated above, and below the streets.

You can have faith in writing itself. That's where to place your faith, in the same way that a pole vaulter places his faith in the laws of physics. He will go up in direct proportion to the strength with which he pushed off, and he will come down every time.