Sara Paretsky
Sara Paretsky
Sara Paretskyis an American author of detective fiction, best known for her novels focused on the female protagonist V.I. Warshawski...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth8 June 1947
CountryUnited States of America
american-author chicago community degree finished loved moved service spent summer work
I had spent a summer in Chicago doing community service work and loved the city, so when I finished my undergraduate degree I moved there permanently.
summer running religious
Organizer is kind of a grand term for what I was doing. I answered an ad that the Presbyterian Church of Chicago put up on college campuses. I was at the University of Kansas, and it's somewhat relevant to my life and work that I'm a Jew. But they weren't doing a religious litmus test. They wanted energetic, civil-rights-committed college students to come help them run some summer programs.
summer new-york children
I had a fantasy as a child that I might be a writer someday. I always thought that meant you went to New York or Paris. But after that intense summer, I never thought that I wanted to live any place but Chicago. It also made me see what the stakes were in the civil rights movement. And it made me see what real hatred was like and the forms that it took. But it also made me understand how powerless ordinary people feel in their lives.
believe kentucky water
It's hard for me to believe that just my words on the page are enough. I ought to be out physically keeping abortion safe and legal, restoring the Fourth Amendment, getting clean water back into Kentucky since the Bush Administration has allowed strip miners to fill it all up with slag. The list is endless. Bring it down. Make it small. Make it one thing that you can do. It's very hard for me to remember that.
sunday order people
And the fury in my community was just staggering. The young priests in the parish were behind the message. The older priests weren't necessarily, but they all followed the orders of the cardinal and read the letter. Every Sunday, 2,000 people came to mass at that parish. The following Sunday, the attendance dropped to 200, and never recovered.
men risk want
The day of the march, we were forbidden to go to the march site. The man I worked for, the Presbyterian minister, knew we would want to be sort of martyrs for the cause and risk arrest. He didn't want any of that going on. So he made us stay in the neighborhood.
fire people catholic
While we were walking around, we came to the Catholic church, and we saw that some people had set fire to carpets and banked them around the rectory, which was made out of wood. They knew every fire truck on the South Side was going to be in the park, that the rectory would just burn to the ground. Our one little act was putting out that fire.
life eyeglasses keys
I wish I could remember where I put things. I spend half my life looking for my keys. With the other half I look for my glasses.
house trying punk
But what I've learned is, when your adrenaline is flowing, you can do a lot. I'm not very physical, but once some punks were trying to break into my house and I chased them down.
writing thinking panic
Sometimes I panic and think I can't really write.
sopranos
I love to sing. I'm a soprano.
white justice horizon
The possibility of bringing white-collar criminals to justice is ever receding over the horizon.
girl reading eye
I was reading Raymond Chandler very much with the feminist eye. In six of his seven novels, it's the woman who presents herself in a sexual way, who is the main bad person. And then you start reading more fiction, whether crime fiction or straight fiction, it's just bad girls trying to make good boys do bad things, going all the way back to Adam and Eve. The woman that thou gavest me made me do it, Adam says to God.
atheist agnostic ends
I'm at the atheist end of the agnostic spectrum.