Sara Paretsky Quotes

Organizer is kind of a grand term for what I was doing.

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.

When you feel lousy, puppy therapy is indicated.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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