Sara Paretsky Quotes & Sayings

#1. Nothing kinder than strangers. Nothing stranger than kindness.

#2. 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.

Sara Paretsky

#3. Caroline, I'm mad enough to beat the shit out of you. But I'm not so mad I can't think. You fingered me to the cops because there's something you know that you're scared to talk about. I want to know what it is.

Sara Paretsky

#4. You get weird and unsettling behaviour in the country.

Sara Paretsky

#5. A god who cares more about a little water on the head than my daughter's character is not a deity I want her to spend eternity with.

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

#8. Rule number something or other
never tell anybody anything unless you're going to get something better in return.

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

#11. The hardest thing about adolescence is that everything seems too big. There's no way to get context or perspective, ... Pain and joy without limits. No one can live like that forever, so experience finally comes to our rescue. We come to know what we can endure, and also that nothing endures.

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

#13. Don't tell me I have latent sexism or racism that I need to confront. I don't believe that. I think we are so burned by the current situation that we want somebody that it isn't possible to have. We want someone who definitely looks like the messiah.

Sara Paretsky

#14. 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.

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

#16. Ship," he said absently. "A boat is something you haul aboard a ship.

Sara Paretsky

#17. 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.

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

#19. I guess my ideals died the hardest. It's often that way with the children of immigrants. We need to buy the dream so bad we sometimes can't wake up.

Sara Paretsky

#20. Sometimes life seems so painful it hurts even to move my arms.

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

#22. She knew the intensity of adolescence, and knew no cure for it except growing up. And then one has age and experience, and mourns the loss of intensity. Maybe it's why musicians and mathmaticians are said to peak young-poetry needs the fire of an unbounded universe.

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

#24. I'm jealous of everyone discovering Lovesey and Diamond for the first time-you have a wonderful backlist to catch up on. Me, all I can do is wait for the next book.

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

#26. 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.

Sara Paretsky

#27. I'm a daydreamer.

Sara Paretsky

#28. 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.

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

#30. I have one vivid memory of one of the days that the marches were taking place. We were in a Catholic, predominantly Polish and Lithuanian neighborhood. Chicago is a place where people define themselves by their parish and by their ethnicity.

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

#32. of Place and the rest of her Hollywood oeuvre. Ferring had won two Emmys for Lakeview, the Jeffersons look-alike series she'd starred in. She'd been photographed at one White House gala with President Clinton and another

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

#36. 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.

Sara Paretsky

#37. 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.

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

#39. 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.

Sara Paretsky

#40. 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.

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

#43. It's always struck me as the ultimate insult to pay to park at hospitals; they incarcerate your friends and relations in rooms that cost six or seven hundred dollars a day, then put a little sting in by charging a few extra bucks to visit them.

Sara Paretsky

#44. When you're struggling to survive, no one gets to label you a coward, not even you yourself in your private thoughts.

Sara Paretsky

#45. I love to sing. I'm a soprano.

Sara Paretsky

#46. 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.

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

#48. 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.

Sara Paretsky

#49. 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.

Sara Paretsky

#50. I'm at the atheist end of the agnostic spectrum.

Sara Paretsky

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

Sara Paretsky

#52. Write what you care about.

Sara Paretsky

#53. 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.

Sara Paretsky

#54. about your actions. You keep me totally in

Sara Paretsky

#55. She came over to me and held me close to her. "You are the daughter of my heart, Victoria. I know it's not the same as having Gabriella, but the love is there

Sara Paretsky

#56. 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.

Sara Paretsky