Top 70 Sara Paretsky Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’m lucky in having found the perfect partner to spend my life with.”

— Sara Paretsky

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

— Sara Paretsky

3. “Never underestimate a man’s ability to underestimate a woman.”

— Sara Paretsky

4. “Rule number something or other – never tell anybody anything unless you’re going to get something better in return.”

— Sara Paretsky

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

— Sara Paretsky

6. “The crime novel has always been my favourite genre.”

— Sara Paretsky

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

— Sara Paretsky

8. “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

9. “I’m a grandmother, and a mighty proud one.”

— Sara Paretsky

10. “Early to bed, early to rise, leaves me cranky with rings under my eyes.”

— Sara Paretsky

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

— Sara Paretsky

12. “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.”

— Sara Paretsky

13. “Nothing kinder than strangers. Nothing stranger than kindness.”

— Sara Paretsky

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

— Sara Paretsky

15. “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

16. “When you feel lousy, puppy therapy is indicated.”

— Sara Paretsky

17. “I live and die with the Chicago Cubs.”

— Sara Paretsky

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

— Sara Paretsky

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

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

— Sara Paretsky

23. “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

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

— Sara Paretsky

25. “If you’re born lucky, you don’t have to be good.”

— Sara Paretsky

26. “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.”

— Sara Paretsky

27. “I believe in the dull lie – make your story boring enough and no one will question it.”

— Sara Paretsky

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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.”

— Sara Paretsky

31. “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

32. “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

33. “Sisters in Crime now has more than 4,000 members worldwide.”

— Sara Paretsky

34. “Ship,” he said absently. “A boat is something you haul aboard a ship.”

— Sara Paretsky

35. “Some men can only admire independent women at a distance.”

— Sara Paretsky

36. “I’m at the atheist end of the agnostic spectrum.”

— Sara Paretsky

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

— Sara Paretsky

38. “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

39. “I had wanted to write Ghost Country for a long time, but it wouldn’t work.”

— Sara Paretsky

40. “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

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

— Sara Paretsky

42. “I realised I’d never climb Everest but thought I could still write a book.”

— Sara Paretsky

43. “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

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

— Sara Paretsky

45. “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

46. “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

47. “Write what you care about.”

— Sara Paretsky

48. “I love to sing. I’m a soprano.”

— Sara Paretsky

49. “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

50. “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