Top 160 Sue Grafton Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “He might be a man without character, but she was a woman without courage. Of the two, which was worse?”

— Sue Grafton

52. “I write because it’s all I know how to do. Writing is my anchor and my purpose. My life is informed by writing, whether the work is going well or I’m stuck in the hell of writer’s block, which I’m happy to report only occurs about once a day.”

— Sue Grafton

53. “Having reached the halfway mark in the alphabet, my prime focus is on writing each new book as well as I can.”

— Sue Grafton

54. “I’ve never written about my husband, Steve, or any of my children because I know them all too well. I see them in all their complexities which makes them impossible to render on the printed page.”

— Sue Grafton

55. “Society values cooperation over independence, obedience over individuality, and niceness above all else.”

— Sue Grafton

56. “There’s a certain class of people who will do you in and then remain completely mystified by the depth of your pain.”

— Sue Grafton

57. “After my years in Hollywood, I got tired of apologizing for work that really wasn’t mine to begin with.”

— Sue Grafton

58. “Life was reduced to its four basic elements: air, food, drink, and a good friend.”

— Sue Grafton

59. “There are laws for everything except the harm families do.”

— Sue Grafton

60. “My job as the writer is to fool you. Your job as the reader is to see if you can catch me at it.”

— Sue Grafton

61. “Poise and indifference so often look the same.”

— Sue Grafton

62. “It’s disconcerting to realize how little you have to say to someone who once occupied such a prominent place in your bed.”

— Sue Grafton

63. “If I’d been listening closely, I’d have caught the sound of the gods having a great big old tee-hee at my expense.”

— Sue Grafton

64. “I know there are people who believe you should forgive and forget. For the record, I’d like to say I’m a big fan of forgiveness as long as I’m given the opportunity to get even first.”

— Sue Grafton

65. “The basic characteristics of any good investigator are a plodding nature and infinite patience. Society has inadvertently been grooming women to this end for years.”

— Sue Grafton

66. “The cold hard truth will fall on stony ground, whereas your all-around trashy rumor will flourish like a weed.”

— Sue Grafton

67. “People can hold out just so long and then they fold.”

— Sue Grafton

68. “Grieving is like being ill. You think the entire world revolves around you and it doesn’t.”

— Sue Grafton

69. “Pretending to be ‘normal’ is a lot harder than you think.”

— Sue Grafton

70. “All of us are subjected to somebody else’s power at some point. So once in a while you kiss ass. So what? Either you make your peace with that early, or you end up living your life as a crank and a misfit.”

— Sue Grafton

71. “The practice of baring all, analyzing every nuance embedded in a quarrel, is a surefire way to keep an argument alive. Better to establish a temporary peace and revisit the conflict later. Often, by then, both parties have decided the issue isn’t worth the relationship.”

— Sue Grafton

72. “Sometimes these kids are ADHD and sometimes not – but they’re always unemotional. They might have tantrums, but what looks like fury is pure manipulation. They have no empathy and they have no desire to please. They don’t care about punishment. They don’t care about other people’s pain and suffering. It just doesn’t interest them.” “You.”

— Sue Grafton

73. “I write letters to my right brain all the time. They’re just little notes. And right brain, who likes to get little notes from me, will often come through within a day or two.”

— Sue Grafton

74. “You write one book and you’re ready for fame and fortune. I don’t know that people are spending the time and attention on learning how to write-which takes years. Everybody sees the success stories.”

— Sue Grafton

75. “The Jungian therapist taught me the difference between the ego and the shadow. I realized I’d been so busy being a good girl that I’d completely detached from my shadow. It’s something we all have, and it’s where all the creative juices are.”

— Sue Grafton

76. “Some death is as silent as the flight of a bird, some prey as unprotesting as a knot of rags. The.”

— Sue Grafton

77. “The Latin term pro bono, as most attorneys will attest, roughly translated means for boneheads and applies to work done without charge.”

— Sue Grafton

78. “I’m not cute at all. I’m a very cranky person.”

— Sue Grafton

79. “My “do” now consisted of some really nifty spikes on top. I looked like a punker, but it was kind of fun, if you want to know the truth. Next thing I knew I’d be getting my ears pierced and chewing gum in public, social sins my auntie had always warned me about, along with red nail polish and dingy bra straps.”

— Sue Grafton

80. “I’m a born liar myself and I know how it’s done. You stick as close to the truth as you can. You pretend to volunteer a few bits of information, but the facts are all carefully selected for effect.”

— Sue Grafton

81. “Age plays cruel tricks on the human face; all our repressed feelings become visible on the surface, where they harden like a mask.”

— Sue Grafton

82. “Except for cases that clearly involve a homicidal maniac, the police like to believe murders are committed by those we know and love, and most of the time they’re right – a chilling thought when you sit down to dinner with a family of five. All those potential killers passing their plates.”

— Sue Grafton

83. “I attended the University of Louisville my freshman year, transferred to what was then Western Kentucky State Teachers College for my sophomore and junior years, and then graduated from the University of Louisville in the summer of 1961.”

— Sue Grafton

84. “Lying contains the same hostile elements as a practical joke in that the ‘victim’ ends up looking foolish in his own eyes and laughable in everyone else’s.”

— Sue Grafton

85. “There are days when none of us can bear it, but the good comes around again. Happiness is seasonal, like anything else. Wait it out. There are people who love you. People who can help.”

— Sue Grafton

86. “I was an English major in college with minors in Fine Arts and Humanities.”

— Sue Grafton

87. “Amazing how quickly someone else’s problems become yours. Trouble creates a vacuum into which the rest of us get sucked.”

— Sue Grafton

88. “People in California seem to age at a different rate than the rest of the country. Maybe it’s the passion for diet and exercise, maybe the popularity of cosmetic surgery. Or maybe we’re afflicted with such a horror of aging that we’ve halted the process psychically.”

— Sue Grafton

89. “Happiness is seasonal, like anything else.”

— Sue Grafton

90. “Sometimes I wonder what the difference is between being cautious and being dead.”

— Sue Grafton

91. “To many women mistake a man’s hostility for wit and his silence for depth.”

— Sue Grafton

92. “There’s something inherent in human nature that has us constructing narratives to explain a world that is otherwise chaotic and opaque. Life is little more than a series of overlapping stories about who we are, where we came from, and how we struggle to survive. What we call news isn’t news at all: wars, murders, famines, plagues – death in all its forms. It’s folly to assign meaning to every chance event, yet we do it all the time.”

— Sue Grafton

93. “Sometimes I claim I write because I put in an application at Sears and they’ve never called back.”

— Sue Grafton

94. “Perhaps when we’re forced to forfeit what we own, we lose any sentimental associations. Perhaps pawning our valuables frees us in the same way a house fire destroys not only our worldly goods, but our attachment to what’s gone.”

— Sue Grafton

95. “Personally, I don’t endorse the notion of mortality. It’s fine for other folk, but I disapprove of the concept for me and my loved ones.”

— Sue Grafton

96. “There is no sound so terrible as a man’s sorrow for his own death.”

— Sue Grafton

97. “To distract myself, I thought about all the cusswords I knew and arranged them in alphabetical order.”

— Sue Grafton

98. “It’s fun to horse around with danger.”

— Sue Grafton

99. “In my opinion, there’s no condition in life that can’t be ameliorated by a dose of junk food.”

— Sue Grafton

100. “There’s nothinng like an outsider’s idle glance to make you conscious of your own environment.”

— Sue Grafton