Top 45 Sarah Weinman Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Sarah Weinman Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

In the summer of 1997, a little more than half a lifeti

In the summer of 1997, a little more than half a lifetime ago, I got my first proper summer job. The job, with one of the many branches of Canada’s federal government in Ottawa, covered the entire tuition for my sophomore year of college.
Sarah Weinman
True-crime shows and podcasts aren’t the only ones flattening the complexity of forensic science into easy-to-grasp narratives: journalists do so, too. They say DNA or trace evidence ‘matches’ a suspect, when scientists can’t be so definitive.
Sarah Weinman
Oddly, the anti-heroes of both ‘The Chill’ and veteran comics writer Peter Milligan’s ‘The Bronx Kill’ share a first name, though their occupations and plights couldn’t be any more different.
Sarah Weinman
First, a confession: I liked ‘The Da Vinci Code.’ This news is even more of a surprise to me than it might be to those who, years ago, heard me quip that I quit reading it because ‘the moment the albino assassin came through the door, I left.’
Sarah Weinman
What I learned in school made me a better journalist and a better writer because forensic science is, as scientific disciplines must be, about critical thinking and objective analysis.
Sarah Weinman
In ‘A Bone in the Throat,’ he describes his protagonist and alter ego, the cook Tommy Pagano, as ‘darker, and not as tall as the chef, his hair stood up straight and spiky like a young Trotsky’s.’ He describes Little Italy with such verve, such flavor, that it is impossible not to smell the streets or taste the food.
Sarah Weinman
Yes, Charles Yu names his main character after himself. That main character, in fact, is both time-machine repairman and author of a book called ‘How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.’
Sarah Weinman
In 2011, I contributed an essay to Tin House, ‘The Dark Side of Dinner Dishes, Laundry, and Child Care,’ talking about women writers I felt had fallen off the map.
Sarah Weinman
By the end of 1982, the game changed. Muller published her second Sharon McCone novel, Sue Grafton introduced Kinsey Millhone in ‘A Is for Alibi’, and the floor was now open – whether some liked it or not – for more women to claim the tropes of private eye fiction for their own.
Sarah Weinman
We tend to think of crime fiction as reading designed for entertainment – not education. It delivers an almost pure kind of readerly pleasure: the mystery solved, justice delivered, roughly or otherwise.
Sarah Weinman
I studied voice and piano fairly seriously during my elementary and high school days, and as such, I became very attuned to rhythm and cadence and voice.
Sarah Weinman
A lot of the major players in the 1960s were the same as the 1940s and 1950s – Hitchen’s ‘Sleep with Slander.’ Armstong’s ‘Lemon in the Basket,’ which is a fusion of the political assassination thriller and a family drama. And Hughes’s ‘The Expendable Man.’
Sarah Weinman
I was pretty serious about pursuing forensic science as a profession. In fact, I pursued an internship at the office of the chief medical examiner here in New York.
Sarah Weinman
‘Child 44’ has no room for inconsequential choices because Stalinist Russia had no room for them, either.
Sarah Weinman
One of the things that has puzzled me the most in my years of serious mystery reading is why there are relatively few standout books geared specifically for middle grade and young adult readers.
Sarah Weinman
Five years before ‘Kitchen Confidential’ – and before then, the ‘New Yorker’ essay that led to the book – Bourdain published ‘A Bone in the Throat,’ a crime novel set in the restaurant world he lived and breathed.
Sarah Weinman
The Boston run of ‘Lolita, My Love’ ended after a mere nine performances – though one of them was recorded at decent enough quality to be preserved by the New York Public Library.
Sarah Weinman
With only one novel to her credit, Anna Jarzab can’t quite be classified in Werlin country, but ‘All Unquiet Things’ is a big step in that direction.
Sarah Weinman
How can quality crime fiction not be produced with available subject matters as the Industrial Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the creation of organized police forces, the dawn of forensic science, and the rise and fall of Romanticism?
Sarah Weinman
Ultimately, bridging the practice of forensic science and the public’s need for story may be difficult. We crave narrative, order from chaos, a mystery solved, good guys winning out over the bad ones. But science, and forensic science, should be more neutral and, thus, more nuanced.
Sarah Weinman
After so many attempts to mount a musical version of ‘Lolita,’ the project was well and truly dead by the summer of 1971. Chief among those relieved: Vladimir Nabokov.
Sarah Weinman
In 1953, the idea of a single female police recruit to the New York City Police Department, let alone a handful, was big news.
Sarah Weinman
The Cold War was over, presidential sex scandals superseded foreign concerns, and the American public was more interested in reading about fiendish serial killers, dependable mystery series protagonists, and any book thought to be in the vein of Bridget Jones and her abbreviation-happy diary.
Sarah Weinman
I’ve waited for a novel from Charles Yu with eager anticipation since being bowled over by his 2006 short story collection, ‘Third Class Superhero.’
Sarah Weinman
The ‘Vampire of Ropraz’ claims to be based on a true story, but the name of Rosa’s father matches that of a notable Swiss artist and restorer. The eventual suspect has the overlong teeth and shambling menace of a would-be vampire, but Chessex leaves the real possibility of his guilt an open question.
Sarah Weinman
‘Laura’ was overtly political for sure. Caspary was trying to make a point about women and independence and how men viewed them, with derision or condescension or on a pedestal, when the real person was ignored.
Sarah Weinman
Indeed, mysteries lead readers through an endless variety of subjects and settings; yet sometimes devotees of detection seek to be transported though another dimension as well: time.
Sarah Weinman
Sue Grafton’s ‘A Is for Alibi’, the 1982 novel that introduced the world to private detective Kinsey Millhone, wasn’t seen as the pioneering achievement we now know it to be.
Sarah Weinman
Alan Jay Lerner needed a hit. The Broadway lyricist and librettist was a decade removed from his greatest successes when his partnership with composer Frederick Loewe produced something approaching unholy alchemy.
Sarah Weinman
Nabokov began writing ‘Lolita’ before he ever knew of Florence ‘Sally’ Horner, an 11-year-old who was kidnapped from Camden, New Jersey, in the summer of 1948.
Sarah Weinman
‘A Burglar’s Guide to the City’ makes disparate connections seem obvious in hindsight, and my worldview is altered a little bit more, and far for the better, as a result. We’ll never know, but I suspect Donald Westlake would have enjoyed it – and perhaps been a little unsettled by it, too.
Sarah Weinman
Like so many other bored teens, I was a bored teen with

Like so many other bored teens, I was a bored teen with a hobby. The only difference was mine was obsessing about crime.
Sarah Weinman
Dorothy B. Hughes – there’s a robust elegance to her writing that I keep responding to again and again. I’ve read her novel ‘In a Lonely Place’ about eight or nine times.
Sarah Weinman
The make-believe world of ‘The Black Tower’ succeeds by broadcasting larger truths that might otherwise elude us.
Sarah Weinman
As an inveterate lover of mystery, cracking the code of a writer’s true identity has the same effect, for me, as tasting forbidden fruit.
Sarah Weinman
Wambaugh’s naturalistic portrait of the cop world turned ‘Centurions’ and ‘The Blue Knight’ (1972) into bestsellers, but his next two books made him relevant to a larger audience and to the next generation of crime writers.
Sarah Weinman
I retain characters more often than plot, but what seems to happen is that I latch on to specific moments, turns of phrase, and dialogue as touchstones for me to recall what happened in the book. Kind of like freeze-frame.
Sarah Weinman
When I first read Helen Weinzweig’s ‘Basic Black with Pearls’ several years ago, I emerged in the sort of daze that happens when a book seems to ferret out your most secret thoughts and hopes. Since then, I’ve described the book to others as an ‘interior feminist espionage novel.’
Sarah Weinman
Having set its tonal template, Vertigo Crime laid low for a few months before starting in earnest at the beginning of 2010.
Sarah Weinman
As I considered Parker and his absurdist reflection in the Westlake-authored ‘Dortmunder’ novels, I wrote, ‘His natural ability to observe human behavior and to follow an idea, no matter how bizarre, through to its proper, rightful finish echoed the vision of an architect.’
Sarah Weinman
‘The Chill,’ by Jason Starr and Mick Bertilorenzi, was both a wise and nervy choice to start the year: Starr’s standalone novels, such as ‘Hard Feelings’ and ‘The Follower,’ sustain a mood not unlike the perpetual unscratchable itch on one’s back, and go Highsmith-level deep into the sociopathic mind.
Sarah Weinman
The quality I appreciated most about Grafton was her loyalty. She stuck with ‘Kinsey Millhone’ and the alphabet series conceit for her entire career but did not allow herself to stagnate as a writer. Kinsey’s first-person narrative gradually made room for other, third-person perspectives.
Sarah Weinman
Longest book was ‘2666’ by Roberto Bolano, and it was an irregular reading experience. I read the first four parts during a cross-country plane trip, reading at slightly slower-than-usual speed but surprised at how accessible the book was compared with ‘The Savage Detectives.’
Sarah Weinman
‘Basic Black with Pearls’ contains overt references to Virginia Woolf and covert ones to feminist classics like Kate Chopin’s ‘The Awakening’ and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ The scholar Ruth Panofsky, who writes extensively about Weinzweig, sees echoes of George Eliot.
Sarah Weinman
There are two ways to approach the writing of a mystery novel: adhere to the rules, or break them with glee.
Sarah Weinman