Quotes from Karin Slaughter

My father and his eight siblings grew up in the kind of poverty that Americans don't like to talk about unless a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina strikes, and then the conversation only lasts as long as the news cycle. His family squatted in shacks. The children scavenged for food.

If you're a smart guy, you should really try to find out what women are thinking. I mean, we are 51 percent of the population.

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.

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

I can clearly trace my passion for reading back to the Jonesboro, Georgia, library, where, for the first time in my life, I had access to what seemed like an unlimited supply of books.

Librarians have always stood up for writers and readers in every kind of community across this country.

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

I thought I had to write literature and add my name to the list of great Southern storytellers. Fortunately for me, no one wanted to read any of those stories. They got rejected by everyone. Sometimes, I would get a note saying they liked the writing, but the story simply didn't work.

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 never felt isolated; I just liked being alone. I think that some people are good at being alone, and some people arent, and as a child, I really liked it.

I think some people are good at being alone, and some people aren't, and as a child, I really liked it.

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.

The most important lesson I have learned from spending years talking to law enforcement officers is that the vast majority of them really want to do a good job. They have a physical need to do a good job. And yet, we don't give them the resources that would help them.

I am a voracious reader myself. I don't stick to one genre. My only criteria is that it's a good story. I try to bring that to my work because I think people can read your excitement about a story.

As awful as crime can be, it's what happens afterward - the struggling to get out of bed, to put one foot in front of the other - that alters people.

A book I would take with me to a desert island is 'Paradise Lost,' which I studied in college and hated so much by the end of the class that I never wanted to see it again.

As a writer, I've always felt it's my job to be extremely careful when writing about victims, especially women.

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

Even if you live in a big city, everybody lives in a small town. We identify ourselves by our neighborhoods - 'I live in the Village, or in Chelsea.'

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.

I read about violent things. I think what I get out of that is entertainment by learning about different things, and reading the genre and getting an understanding of motivations. But at the end of the day, it's still a book, and I can walk away.

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

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

I think that people do things for a reason - that we have mental illness, that we have genetic wiring that can get triggered by certain environmental factors.