Top 95 Karin Slaughter Quotes

I think crime fiction is a great way to talk about social issues, whether ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ or ‘The Lovely Bones;’ violence is a way to open up that information you want to get out to the reader.

Anyone who’s been to high school with teenage girls knows how horrible girls can be.

I think chalking up human behavior to evil lets us all off the hook too easily.

There aren’t many people in the world who can say that they are doing the job they’ve wanted to do since childhood, so in that regard, I feel incredibly fortunate.

I read extensively about serial killers and all sorts of things people get up to.

Like every Southern writer, I thought that I needed to write the next ‘Gone With the Wind.’

I want to be a better writer. I want to learn and grow, to know how to tell stories in a different and more challenging way. I’ve learned it doesn’t get easier each time. It actually gets harder.

When you grow up starving, you cannot point with pride to a book you’ve just spent six hours reading. Picking cotton, sewing flour bags into clothes – those were the skills my father grew up appreciating.

That’s why I love crime novels so much: When I write a crime novel, the conflict is built in.

I always wanted to be a writer. In the beginning, I thought I had to rewrite ‘Gone with the Wind,’ but eventually, I found my way and realized that wasn’t me.

I’ve never purposefully based a character on any one person I know, but I’m certain there are amalgamations that exist.

My sister is dyslexic, and she’s so smart, so intelligent in all of the ways that matter.

I’m extremely introverted. I used to think it was shyness, but I got over that, so it must be door No. 2. It’s still hard for me to be away from home much, and I have to make sure I get lots of time alone in my room when I’m touring.

I busted my chin open trying to be Evel Knievel on my bike. When it happened, you could see straight through to the bone, I thought my dad was going to pass out. It left a scar that I still have now.

In the South, we drink the Bible with our mother’s milk.

Every writer I know got their start in a library somewhere. We read a book, and we thought, ‘I want to do that.’

I always try to block out an hour or so a day to read. Being a writer is a job, and reading helps train my brain in the right direction.

Southerners have this love of embellishment. Even when you read a police report, there’s some backstory.

I’m just not a crazy, stay-out-all-night sort of person. I love writing.

I have a lot of men who will say to me, ‘I don’t read books by women, but I like you.’

I love twins stories.

There’s a tendency among some male writers to make the women in their stories weak and needing of rescue so that their hero looks like a manly man.

I love puns. I’ve been known to turn the car around just to take advantage of a good pun situation. It really is the highest form of humor.

I never felt isolated; I just liked being alone. I think that some people are good at being alone, and some people aren’t, and as a child, I really liked it.

As voters and taxpayers, we must demand that our local governments properly prioritize libraries. As citizens, we must invest in our library down the street so that the generations served by that library grow up to be adults who contribute not just to their local communities but to the world.

Women know how to scare other women.

I set the goal of getting a book contract by age thirty.

I started Save the Libraries in 2010 by hosting a big fundraiser in my city library of DeKalb County in Atlanta. Through that, I learned that even with fundraisers, libraries often don’t make money – they just barely break even.

I’ve always been drawn to historical fiction.

When I was growing up, my stepmother’s sister was the chief detective in one of the adjoining towns, so she piqued my interest in crime.

I think a lot of guys who are on the Internet a lot, they’re kind of anesthetized to some of the violent language and all that because they see it all the time.

No matter where you are on the political spectrum, libraries make sense. It’s such a small investment. Every dollar supporting a library system returns five dollars to the community.

I grew up having the library as the best place ever. I spent a lot of weekends there as a kid – my parents would drop me off and leave me there all day. I would just sit in the back and read whatever I could find.

Graphic novels let you take risks that just wouldn’t fly in the conventional book form.

I write fifteen hours a day, stopping at Oprah-o’clock.

‘Encyclopedia Brown Takes the Case,’ ‘The Secret of the Old Clock,’ ‘Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret,’ ‘Flowers in the Attic,’ ‘Gone With the Wind’ – these are the books that defined my childhood. They thrilled me. They made me feel like I wasn’t alone in the world.

If you wear them outside, they stop being pyjamas. I wear mine to the mail box, which is right in front of my house – that’s my limit. Anything else is wrong.

Everybody had something horrible happen to them at one time or another in their life.

My sister lived in England for a while when I was 12, and I came to visit her, and I spent most of the time in her flat reading.

We make assumptions: nurses should be nice, teachers should be good. But everyone has a dark side, some darker than others.

When I became a published writer, I said, ‘Whatever I can do to help the libraries I want to do,’ so all of my book tours since then have involved me coming to a library and talking about how important libraries are for a community.

It seems like women are always told, ‘It is not your time.’

Visual storytelling is at once immediate and subversive.

Women can be two different people – one person at home, another at work.

I’m going to name a name: Janet Evanovich. She writes the same book over and over, and I read every single one of them and eagerly anticipate them.

Good writers know that crime is an entre into telling a greater story about character. Good crime writing holds up a mirror to the readers and reflects in a darker light the world in which they live.

If you’re going to write thrillers, you have to make a decision if you are going to be realistic or go off and over.

I’ve always been drawn to dark stories. I enjoy reading Flannery O’Connor, Patricia Highsmith, and Margaret Mitchell.

I love reading almost as much as I love writing.

If there is still an American dream, reading is one of the bootstraps by which we can all pull ourselves up.

Readers are very, very savvy, and I don’t want to insult them by making them think I’m too lazy to get it right.

Though he was not a reader himself, my father understood that reading is not just an escape. It is access to a better way of life.

I always say ‘thriller;’ if they see you’re a woman – and you’re a blond woman – people assume you’re writing about cats and romances where somebody has died.

I never want to write a book just to tell a story. There is always something deeper going on.

Growing up in Georgia in the southeastern United States, I was always reading and always kept to myself. I never felt isolated, though; I just liked being alone.

With ‘Pretty Girls,’ I saw the opportunity to talk not just about crime but what crime leaves behind.

I know the cadence of the language and the voice of Atlanta because I’ve lived here for so long.

I think that characters who are nice all the time and who you sympathize with can get really boring.

Books give us insight into other people, other cultures. They make us laugh. They make us think. If they are really good, they make us believe that we are better for having read them. You don’t read a book – you experience it. Every story opens up a new world.

I grew up reading thrillers. Honestly, I was always drawn to the very detailed ones like Patricia Cornwell. I love details.

Jack Reacher is one of the sexiest characters in fiction.

My typical morning involves some time on the treadmill, but obviously I skip that a lot. Mostly, I wake up, check my email, then get to work on the various interviews and questions and phone calls that come with being an author.

Even ‘Gone With the Wind’ had a shocking, cold-blooded murder.

Usually, when inspiration strikes late, the light of day reveals that I haven’t gotten an idea for a book so much as a psychiatric case study.

Feminism has been so co-opted, but the fact is, feminism benefits men as well.

Most of my books begin with a nap on my couch here, when I dream up characters and story lines, and then I write on my laptop in the recliner and handle the business side of email at my desk, which is sagging in the middle – maybe from so many words?

I think being a woman and writing frankly about violence has gotten me some attention, and as someone who wants people to read my books, I can’t complain about that attention, but it does puzzle me that this is something reviewers focus on.

If I wasn’t a writer, I would probably be a watchmaker. I like putting puzzles together, and that is what a watch is, figuring out how all the gears and everything else works together. I’m patient and good at focusing on a single task.