Top 88 Quotes & Sayings by Sara Paretsky

I always wrote; my first story was published in the magazine The American Girl when I was 11.

I went to college at the University of Kansas, where I got a degree in political science.

Most people don't have the money to spend on advertising to create awareness among readers, nor do they have the contacts at newspapers or magazines to get their books reviewed.

Sometimes I panic and think I can't really write.

Write what you care about.

I realised I'd never climb Everest but thought I could still write a book.

I had wanted to write Ghost Country for a long time, but it wouldn't work.

In 1986 we were trying to help women get in print, stay in print, and come to the attention of booksellers and libraries. At that time, books by men mystery writers were reviewed seven times as often as books by women.

White-collar crime gets more outrageous by the second in America.

I grew up in conservative rural Kansas in the 1950s when it was expected that girls would not have a life outside the home, so educating them was a waste of time.

The possibility of bringing white-collar criminals to justice is ever receding over the horizon.

Reviewers said Ghost Country was rich, astonishing and affecting in the way it blended comedy, magic, and a gritty urban realism in a breathtaking ride along Chicago's mean streets.

I'm a daydreamer.

Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel.

Capo, my first golden retriever, so loved to swim she once jumped off a cliff to get into Lake Superior.

I have a friend who lives in the South Side of Chicago. I helped out at a church charity there where they try to give a bit of cohesion to a desperate area. Everyone was very welcoming.

I'm a grandmother, and a mighty proud one.

I'm very honoured that there is a loyal following and I hope it continues.

I love to sing. I'm a soprano.

I thought it was time for a tough, smart, likable female private investigator, and that's how VI came to life.

It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating.

I wish I could remember where I put things. I spend half my life looking for my keys. With the other half I look for my glasses.

I'm lucky in having found the perfect partner to spend my life with.

Sometimes I think I'm a one-trick pony because I'm not very inventive about new ways of telling stories.

I live and die with the Chicago Cubs.

My parents were liberal intellectuals but even they expected me to stay at home and look after my younger siblings and do the housework.

The best source for finding an agent is called Literary Agents of North America. It's a complete list of agents, not only by name and address, but by type of book they represent and by what their submission criteria are.

The crime novel has always been my favourite genre.

People have less privacy and are crammed together in cities, but in the wide open spaces they secretly keep tabs on each other a lot more.

I spent 10 years as a marketing manager. I've found my experience in the financial world invaluable background for writing about white-collar crimes.

No agent wants to see a book until he or she has decided whether to pursue the relationship.

You get weird and unsettling behaviour in the country.

Sisters in Crime now has more than 4,000 members worldwide.

But what I've learned is, when your adrenaline is flowing, you can do a lot. I'm not very physical, but once some punks were trying to break into my house and I chased them down.

The hope for a messiah puts too much on that one person. And you think that absolves you of personal responsibility and you don't have to act because that person will do it for you.

I cannot find words to express the depth of my loss or outrage about what's happening to this country. I don't know if I can find the words for it, but if this country ever recovers, it will not be in my lifetime. If I were elected President, the first thing I would do would be to set up a Department of Restoring the Bill of Rights. I would have 10,000 people working there.

I always wrote; my first story was published in the magazine The American Girl when I was 11

When I enter a library, when I enter the world of books, I feel the ghosts of the past on my shoulders urging me to speech. I hear Patrick Henry cry to the Burgsses, 'Is Life so dear, or Peace so sweet, to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?' I hear Sojourner Truth tell me that the hand that rocks the cradle can also rock the boat, and William Lloyd Garrison say, 'I am in earnest, I will not be silenced.'

It's hard for me to believe that just my words on the page are enough. I ought to be out physically keeping abortion safe and legal, restoring the Fourth Amendment, getting clean water back into Kentucky since the Bush Administration has allowed strip miners to fill it all up with slag. The list is endless. Bring it down. Make it small. Make it one thing that you can do. It's very hard for me to remember that.

No agent wants to see a book until he or she has decided whether to pursue the relationship

There is no frigate like a book and no harbor like a library, where those who love books but can't afford their own complete collections, or those who need a computer, or kids who need a safe place to read after school, or moms with toddlers who want their babies to learn to read, can all come together and share in a great community resource.

Every writer's difficult journey is a movement from silence to speech. We must be intensely private and interior in order to find a voice and a vision - and we must bring our work to an outside world where the market, or public outrage, or even government censorship can destroy our voice.

I believe that to create real-seeming characters, the writer must be willing to go on a voyage of self-exploration. It can be revealing and even painful to explore your own weakness, but it gives you genuine emotion. Characters in fiction come alive because of the believability of their emotional lives and that is what I strive to create.

The decimation of Lebanon was showing up in Chicago as a series of restaurants and little shops, just as the destruction of Vietnam had been visible here a decade earlier. If you never read the news but ate out a lot you should be able to tell who was getting beaten up around the world.

The day of the march, we were forbidden to go to the march site. The man I worked for, the Presbyterian minister, knew we would want to be sort of martyrs for the cause and risk arrest. He didn't want any of that going on. So he made us stay in the neighborhood.

I'm lucky in having found the perfect partner to spend my life with

When you feel lousy, puppy therapy is indicated.

Hard to remember who is more dangerous: the people who are attacking our liberties overseas, or those who are suppressing them at home.

I think Peter Dickinson is hands down the best stylist as a writer and the most interesting storyteller in my genre.

I began wanting to create a detective who really turned the tables on that image of women, to know that you could have a sex life and not be a bad person. You could have a sex life and still solve your own problems. It was eight years from when I started having the fantasy that I was going to create such a detective to when I actually sat down and came up with V. I. Warshawski. It was a long, slow journey to come to a writing voice and do that character.

I look at the great poets of the Soviet Union, like Anna Akhmatova, who endured far worse then anything we've seen or hopefully that we will ever see. If they could keep writing and keep a voice alive, keep people hopeful through their poetry, then I would be ashamed to stop and to give in. It would be really self-indulgent, unacceptable, and inexcusable to walk away from it.

Heart surgeons do not have the world's smallest egos: when you ask them to name the world's three leading practitioners, they never can remember the names of the other two.

Nothing kinder than strangers. Nothing stranger than kindness.

You have to be a ruthless editor of your own prose. Over the years, I've learned that the best way to incorporate research into the narrative is to turn it into action.

It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating

The rich are different than you and me: they have more money and they have more power.

All food starting with p is comfort food: pasta, potato chips, pretzels, peanut butter, pastrami, Pizza, pastry.

If I were elected President, the first thing I would do would be to set up a Department of Restoring the Bill of Rights. I would have 10,000 people working there.

Never underestimate a man's ability to underestimate a woman.

Live disasters are wonderful attractions when you're safe on the other side of them.