272 Quotes by Sue Grafton

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.

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

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.

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

The struggle is what teaches you.

You write one book and you're ready for fame and fortune. I don't know that people are spending the time and attention on learning how to write-which takes years. Everybody sees the success stories.

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.

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

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.