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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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"A child's best friend is often the one telling bedtime stories."

"Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence."

"I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome."

"It was not, of course, a proper thing to do. But then I have never pretended, nor will ever pretend, that Emily was a proper child. Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull nobody would read them."

"And yet a child's utter innocence is but its blank ignorance, and the innocence more or less wanes as intelligence waxes."

"Their suburbia house in Brentwood' was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children imagine themselves to need."

"We were still children and residing in the mosque from morning to evening. We were about to turn into monsters."

"It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like but don't. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know?"
Explore more quotes by Sara Paretsky


"Most people don't have the money to spend on advertising to create awareness among readers, nor do they have the contacts at newspapers or magazines to get their books reviewed."


"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."


"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."


"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."
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