Sara Paretsky Quotes
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Never underestimate a man's ability to underestimate a woman.
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The rich are different than you and me: they have more money and they have more power.
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I had wanted to write Ghost Country for a long time, but it wouldn't work.
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Rule number something or other -- never tell anybody anything unless you're going to get something better in return.
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When you feel lousy, puppy therapy is indicated.
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Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel
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Capo, my first golden retriever, so loved to swim she once jumped off a cliff to get into Lake Superior.
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My parents were liberal intellectuals but even they expected me to stay at home and look after my younger siblings and do the housework.
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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.
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Nothing kinder than strangers. Nothing stranger than kindness.
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I realised I'd never climb Everest but thought I could still write a book
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No agent wants to see a book until he or she has decided whether to pursue the relationship
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And the fury in my community was just staggering. The young priests in the parish were behind the message. The older priests weren't necessarily, but they all followed the orders of the cardinal and read the letter. Every Sunday, 2,000 people came to mass at that parish. The following Sunday, the attendance dropped to 200, and never recovered.
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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.
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This was a very progressive group of clergy who foresaw the race riots that were going to take place when Dr. King started helping the local civil rights community push for open housing. They were sort of hoping against hope that we could educate kids in a way that could counter some of the racist messages they were imbibing at home. I don't know whether we did any good, but it changed my life in every single way.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.