Sara Paretsky Quotes

But then, did I look like a detective? Come to think of it, most people don't try to guess what women do for a living by the way they look - but they are usually astounded to find out what I do.

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

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.

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

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

I'm a daydreamer.

I live and die with the Chicago Cubs.

You know me, Bobby--I have an instinct for crime. Where evil flourishes, there I will be, on my self-appointed mission to stamp it out.

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.

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

I could hear her [Vic's Italian mother] saying, "Yes, Vic, you are pretty -- but pretty is no good. Any girl can be pretty -- but to take care of yourself you must have brains. And you must have a job, a profession. You must work.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

You know, if Tony had turned you over his knee more often instead of spoiling you rotten, you'd be a happy housewife now, instead of playing at detective and making it harder for us to get our job done.

But I'm a happy detective, Bobby, and I made a lousy housewife.

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

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.

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.'

Organizer is kind of a grand term for what I was doing. I answered an ad that the Presbyterian Church of Chicago put up on college campuses. I was at the University of Kansas, and it's somewhat relevant to my life and work that I'm a Jew. But they weren't doing a religious litmus test. They wanted energetic, civil-rights-committed college students to come help them run some summer programs.

I had a fantasy as a child that I might be a writer someday. I always thought that meant you went to New York or Paris. But after that intense summer, I never thought that I wanted to live any place but Chicago. It also made me see what the stakes were in the civil rights movement. And it made me see what real hatred was like and the forms that it took. But it also made me understand how powerless ordinary people feel in their lives.

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

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 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.

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

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

You know why Polish jokes are so short?...So the Germans can remember them.

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.

about your actions. You keep me totally in

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

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

You get weird and unsettling behaviour in the country.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

These events are swirling around them. In the white community, people felt like they had no control over their neighborhoods, their destiny. In the black community, centuries of government and economic forces were pushing on them. I went in with a kind of arrogance, maybe, that came from living in a very intellectual family, and I left knowing that there was a lot about the way people lived that I didn't know about.

While we were walking around, we came to the Catholic church, and we saw that some people had set fire to carpets and banked them around the rectory, which was made out of wood. They knew every fire truck on the South Side was going to be in the park, that the rectory would just burn to the ground. Our one little act was putting out that fire.

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.

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

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

You? You're no more a detective than I am a ballet dancer," he exclaimed.

"I'd like to see you in tights and a tutu.

Look, Max, I don't know why Chigwell tried to kill himself. … But if it was because of the questions I was asking, I don't feel one minute of remorse. … If – and it's a mighty big if – if I'd known two weeks ago that my seeing him would make him turn on the gas, you'd better believe I'd do it again.

I was reading Raymond Chandler very much with the feminist eye. In six of his seven novels, it's the woman who presents herself in a sexual way, who is the main bad person. And then you start reading more fiction, whether crime fiction or straight fiction, it's just bad girls trying to make good boys do bad things, going all the way back to Adam and Eve. The woman that thou gavest me made me do it, Adam says to God.

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.

Now I've heard everyhing, I thought. Hired to find a person so her boyfriend would go to business school.

I believe in the dull lie - make your story boring enough and no one will question it.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

When I tell people I was in the St. Justin Martyr parish, if they are native Chicagoans they know exactly where I was and what that was like. The Sunday before this particular march, the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Cody, had required all of his pastors to read a letter in support of open housing and economic justice in every parish in the city.

his back to her. "Vic, how long's it been?" "How'd you end up down here, Sid?" I asked. "I thought you knew better than to put yourself in the crosshairs." "Nobody asks me to go out on the street anymore and I got me a weekend place down near Schererville." He winked, meaning, I suppose, that he was actually living down in Indiana - a no-no for someone on Chicago's payroll. Sid had been one of my dad's last partners, after Tony had been redeemed from cop hell: my dad had been sent to West Englewood

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.