Sue Grafton quotes:

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.

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

I'm not sure Kinsey has changed in these first twelve books. I think the reader learns more about her, but from Kinsey's perspective, only three years have passed while the rest of us have been getting older at a much faster clip.

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.

The character of Rosie is based on a woman who used to live in the same apartment building I lived in many years ago. She's taken on a life of her own, of course.

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

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

God save us from the people who want to do what's best for us.

Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them." "I don't believe in ghosts," I said, faintly. "Some people can't see the color red. That doesn't mean it isn't there," she replied.

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

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

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

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.

Personally, I'd rather grow old alone than in the company of anyone I've met so far. I don't experience myself as lonely, incomplete, or unfulfilled, but I don't talk about that much. It seems to piss people off--especially men. (Kinsey Millhone)

For the record, I'd like to say that I'm a big fan of forgiveness as long as I have a chance to get even first" Kinsey Millhone, V is for Vengeance

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

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

People talk about dysfunctional families; I've never seen any other kind.

Insecure people have a special sensitivity for anything that finally confirms their own low opinion of themselves.

Emotion doesn't travel in a straight line. Like water, our feelings trickle down through cracks and crevices, seeking out the little pockets of neediness and neglect, the hairline fractures in our character usually hidden from public view.

The hard thing about death is that nothing ever changes. The hard thing about life is that nothing stays the same.

I focus on the writing and let the rest of the process take care of itself. I've learned to trust my own instincts and I've also learned to take risks.

When all else fails, cleaning house is the perfect antidote to most of life's ills.

Some people can't see the color red. That doesn't mean it isn't there,

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.

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

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.

My notion of an elegant table is you don't leave the knife sticking out of the mayonnaise jar.

Writing is not about making a buck, not about publishers and agents. Writing is not about feeling good. Writing is about pain, suffering, hard work, risk, and fear.

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

You kill people you hate or you kill in rage or you kill to get even, but you don't kill someone you're indifferent to.

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.

Poise and indifference so often look the same.

Some people die accidentally. It's a fact.

How can you trust someone who doesn't bother to spell correctly or can't manage to lay out a simple declarative sentence?

All the little birdies had flown out of this man's tree.

As it is, we could not call mine a beautiful puss, but it does the job well enough, distinguishing the front of my head from the back.

Grief rolled across the space between us like a wash of salt water.

The beauty of word processing, God bless my word processor, is that it keeps the plotting very fluid. The prose becomes like a liquid that you can manipulate at will. In the old days, when I typed, every piece of typing paper was like cast in concrete.

Train yourself to listen to that small voice that tells us what's important and what's not.

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.

The truth is, I could no more dictate her nature than she could dictate mine. Kinsey's happy as she is and she doesn't need to be rescued, improved, or saved.

I don't want to write formula. I don't want to crank these books out like sausages. Every book is different, which takes a hell of a lot of ingenuity on my part.

A is for Alibi, my first book, was published in 1982. As it happened the next couple of books took place in June and August of that year. Without meaning to I painted myself into a corner. The other issue was the aging process. I did not want my main character to age one year for every book so I slowed the whole process down. This way I could get through all 26 letters of the alphabet without making her 109 years old in 2015. I might end the series in either 1990 or on New Years Eve 1989.

A woman should never, never, never be financially dependent to anyone, especially a man, because the minute you were dependent, you could be abused.

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

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.

any mystery writer is both magician and moralist ... two species of artist in short supply.

Beware the dark pool at the bottom of our hearts. In its icy, black depths dwell strange and twisted creatures it is best not to disturb.

Dream big but think small.

Everything happens for a reason, but that doesn't mean there's a point.

Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them.

Give yourself time to get better.

Grade school was perilous. ... I can see how I must have worried them. I was the kind of kid who, for no apparent reason, wept piteously or threw up on myself. On an especially scary day, I sometimes did both.

grief is an illness I can't recover from.

Grief is as contagious as a yawn.

Grieving is like being ill. You think the entire world revolves around you and it doesn't.

Happiness is seasonal, like anything else

He might be a man without character, but she was a woman without courage. Of the two, which was worse?

I caution writers all the time to slow down and pay more attention to the work in front of them than to the end result. I don't think you write one book and get anywhere. I think you write five books and then maybe you are finally on the right path.

I figure guys are like Whitman's Samplers. I like to take a little bite out of each and then move on before the whole box gets stale.

I hate nature. I really do. Nature is composed entirely of sticks, dirt, fall-down places, biting and stinging things, and savageries too numerous to list. And I'm not the only one who feels this way. Man has been building cities since the year oughty-ought, just to get away from this stuff.

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.

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

I made the rules I figured I could be the one to break them. I thought I would write about xenophobia, a hatred of foreigners. After I stated writing the story there was not a foreigner to be had. I did not want to just stick one in there so I could get a title out of it since it seemed like cheating. I never figured out how I could get out of this dilemma so I just called it X and weaved X traits into the story.

I only get writer's block about once a day.

I read the paper every day. There are certain subjects that will catch my attention. I have an entire file of articles. Of course I make up the story, especially since most criminals are not very smart and fictional crime must be clever. I have to make sure the story I am telling is interesting and realistic. In this book I went on line and found out the manners of codes. I thought it interesting to use them as a jumping off point.

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.

I think you'd best make your peace with the past since you've come this far. I think you know by now that you won't go back again.

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.

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.

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.

If your mind isn't open, keep your mouth shut too.

If you're unhappy, change something.

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

It is a truth of human nature that we can ponder life's mysteries for only so long before we lose interest and move on to something else.

It's been my observation, after years in the [insurance] business, that a certain percent of the population simply can't resist the urge to cheat.

I've never known anyone yet who doesn't suffer a certain restlessness when autumn rolls around... We're all eight years old again and anything is possible.

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.

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

Lucky is the spouse who dies first, who never has to know what survivors endure.

My father taught me to love detective fiction writers such as Raymond Chandler. When I decided to have a hard-boiled detective series I did a lot of studying before I wrote the first book. I learned police procedure, the California criminal law, and many areas outside my expertise.

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

My second husband and I were going through a bitter divorce, and I didn't have the money for a fancy-pants attorney. I didn't know how to fight, so I'd lie awake at night and think of ways to kill him. But I knew I'd get caught, so I decided to put it in a book and get paid for it! I always think it's odd that a whole career came out of that homicidal impulse.

No one with a happy childhood ever amounts to much in this world. They are so well adjusted, they never are driven to achieve anything.

Of the first seven novels I wrote, numbers four and five were published. Numbers one, two, three, six, and seven, have never seen the light of day... and rightly so.

Pay enough for anything and it passes for taste.

Pay minimum wage, you get minimum work. Nobody seems to get that.

People get careless when they're feeling safe.

People who've had happy childhoods are wonderful, but they're bland... An unhappy childhood compels you to use your imagination to create a world in which you can be happy. Use your old grief. That's the gift you're given.

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.

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.

Pretending to be 'normal' is a lot harder than you think.

School was a source of great suffering to me, but once I learned to read, I disappeared into books, where I was a happy visitor to all the worlds that sprang full-blown from the printed page.

Smile. It gives your face something to do.

So much of the past in encapsulated in the odds and ends. Most of us discard more information about ourselves than we ever care to preserve. Our recollection of the past is not simply distorted by our faulty perception of events remembered but skewed by those forgotten. The memory is like twin orbiting stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what's evident forever affected by the gravity of what's concealed.

Sometimes being fooled by love is worth the price. At least you know you're alive and capable of feeling, even if all you end up with is chest pain.

Sometimes I claim I write because I put in an application at Sears and they've never called back.

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

Sometimes the hardest part of my job is the incessant reminder of the fact we're all trying so assiduously to ignore: we are here temporarily ... life is only ours on loan.

That's the way the system works. Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you.

The critical lessons in life hold sway whether you like it or not.

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.

The memory is like orbiting twin stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what's evident forever affected by the gravity of what's concealed.

The struggle is what teaches you.

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.

There are laws for everything except the harm families do.

There is no sound so terrible as a man's sorrow for his own death.

There is, apparently, some law of nature decreeing that all home construction must double in its projected cost and take four times longer than originally anticipated.

There was an author who titled his books by days of the weeks and another one that used colors. Then there was Edward Gorey who wrote the book The Gashlycrumb Tinies, about the untimely death of 26 Victorian children, each representing a letter of the alphabet. I thought what a great way to link the titles.

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

There's nothing quite as irksome as someone else's mess.

There's really no such thing as an 'ex-cop' or a cop who's 'off-duty' or 'retired.' Once trained, once indoctrinated, a cop is always alert, assessing reality in terms of its potential for illegal acts.

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

To many women mistake a man's hostility for wit and his silence for depth.

Too much virtue has a corrupting effect.

What could smell better than supper being cooked by someone else?

Who knows what part we play in other people's dreams?

Writing is a process and you must trust the process! Fear and anxiety are part of that process along with the enthusaism and the good days and the joy and the passion and the great hopes you have for a book. But when you run into problems, when you get stuck or scared, you must trust that that is part of how a book comes to pass, and what you need to do is get very still and quiet because Self will tell you how to get out of a hole you've dug for yourself.