Sue Grafton

“You can’t save others from themselves because those who make a perpetual muddle of their lives don’t appreciate your interfering with the drama they’ve created. They want your poor-sweet-baby sympathy, but they don’t want to change.”

“Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats.”

“Henry is entirely invented though by now I feel he's as real as anyone I know.”

“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.”

“My primary lesson, however, was that I'm a solo writer, happiest when I'm making all the executive decisions. I've always been willing to rise or fall on my own merits.”

“Thinking is hard work, which is why you don't see many people doing it.”

“Let’s face it, life is trivial, and my guess is that dying imparts very little wisdom on those in process.”

“I love being single. It's almost like being rich.”

“I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form.”

“I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.”

“nothing wrong with a lie or two when the situation demanded it”

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

“Kinsey was never a lawyer. She's strictly blue collar.”

“We all need to look into the dark side of our nature - that's where the energy is, the passion. People are afraid of that because it holds pieces of us we're busy denying.”

“I did an about-face and veered into the sandwich shop. What I ordered is none of your business, but it was really good.”

“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.”

“Books are like movies of the mind and it's better to leave Kinsey where she is.”

“If high heels were so wonderful, men would be wearing them.”

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

“At that point, I sat down and made an alphabetical list of all the crime related words I could think of. So here I am now, nearly half-way through, probably tied up until the year 2015 or SO.”