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To understand the current state of mind of both Sara Paretsky and her private detective alter ego, one must first roll back the clock to 1982, when Victoria Iphegenia Warshawski took her first investigative bow in 'Indemnity Only.'

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.

What people need to know is that asthma isn't a minor 'wheeze-disease.' It kills over five thousand people in America every year, and I could've been one of them.

In my students, I'm always dispelling the notion that characters come like a light bulb over the head in cartoons. For me, it's like a shapeless big lump of clay. You just build it into something, and then you step back and go, 'That's not right,' hack it apart, put out a new arm, and say, 'Maybe this will walk around and work.'

If my kid couldn't draw I'd make sure that my kitchen magnets didn't work.

You go back and you read your Constitution. You read your Declaration of Independence. And you will see that the only people who could decide these freedoms were white males who owned property, and all the rest of us were excluded.

I was working at the telephone company in the late '80s as a service representative.

I think people have this love-hate relationship with tennis. I also feel like that.

Every time a government minister or spokesman lauds Magna Carta, let us boo or hiss. Shame them. And let us celebrate what it really means to our history: the ability of an emerging class to make demands against the state for new liberties and rights.

Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action. (There is no reality except in action.)

I love Carrie Fisher, and it would be amazing to carry on her legacy.

We use the term 'fight' very lightly - 'I've been fighting so hard to get my car, I've been fighting so hard to get that job, I've been fighting so hard to get that girl.' But the reality is boxers do fight bitterly to get whatever they want or whatever they need in life, and most of them come from nothing, which is the case of Roberto Duran.

The best investment one can make with one's time is to spend it on happiness.

I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun. But I really love Durham more than any place I've ever been; some small towns can be really provincial and strangling, but Durham is the best city in the world.

I don't know about other writers, but for myself, to write I must be relatively quiet - it's very difficult to write with the telephone and the doorbell ringing and conversation going on; I'm not that good a writer to write through all that!

When was it I realized that, on this truly dark and solitary path we all walk, the only way we can light is our own? Although I was raised with love, I was always lonely. Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time.

And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.

I try to naturally keep things to a manageable storytelling length, which is about two hours, so you try to cut out anything extraneous.

There are two ways of constructing a piece of software: One is to make it so simple that there are obviously no errors, and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious errors.

Everybody loves 'The Wire,' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series.