Sara Paretsky Quotes
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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
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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.
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Sometimes I panic and think I can't really write.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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All food starting with p is comfort food: pasta, potato chips, pretzels, peanut butter, pastrami, Pizza, pastry.
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I believe in the dull lie - make your story boring enough and no one will question it.
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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.
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I always wrote; my first story was published in the magazine The American Girl when I was 11
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Sisters in Crime now has more than 4,000 members worldwide.
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Hard to remember who is more dangerous: the people who are attacking our liberties overseas, or those who are suppressing them at home.
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I'm at the atheist end of the agnostic spectrum.
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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.
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I'm very honoured that there is a loyal following and I hope it continues
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The crime novel has always been my favourite genre.
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I'm a grandmother, and a mighty proud one.
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I think Peter Dickinson is hands down the best stylist as a writer and the most interesting storyteller in my genre.
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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.
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Write what you care about.
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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.
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If you're born lucky, you don't have to be good.