Quotes from Sue Grafton

Essentially we're talking about the buildup of ketones in the blood. Ketones are a type of acid that form when the body breaks down fat for energy. Patients typically have a recent history of binge drinking, little or no food intake, and persistent vomiting. This results in a delay and decrease in insulin secretion and excess glucagon secretion. A lot of hokum here that I'll skip . . . "Basically

one of those peanut butter and pickle sandwiches I'm so fussy about. Whole grain bread, Jif Extra Crunchy, and Vlasic or Mrs. Fanning's Bread'n Butter Pickles.

same cup he always carried, his perpetual bourbon and Coke.

My practice is to cut the finished product on the diagonal and then wrap it in waxed paper that I still fold the way my Aunt Gin taught me. I'd added two Milano cookies and, being ever so dainty, I included two paper napkins, one to serve as a place mat and one for dabbing my lips.

I'm not the kind of person who sentimentalizes nature. The outdoors, as far as I can see, is made up almost entirely of copulating creatures who eat one another afterwards.

Kim Bass, Receptionist, was nowhere to be seen. This was fortunate, as I was so irritated with the way she'd treated me, I might have bitten her on the arm. I'd been a biter as a kid and I can still remember the feel of flesh between my teeth. It's like biting a rubber bathing cap, in case you're curious.

The only colors I could see were the vibrant primary hues of the pinball machine, where a cartoon spacewoman with big conical breasts straddled the earth in a formfitting blue space suit and thigh-high yellow boots. Behind her, a big red dildo-shaped spaceship was just blasting off for the moon.

Pay enough for anything and it passes for taste.

I hid the fold of paper in my bra, where I knew it would remain undisturbed.

I am still able to recite long portions of Alfred Noyes's "The Highwayman" at the slightest provocation.

I'm smart 1 day out of 30, but I never know which day it will be so I have to sit patiently, feeling like an ignoramus most of the time.

up. A singsong voice said, "At the sound of the tone, General Telephone time will be twelve o'clock, exactly." I burst out laughing and Althea looked at me.

We been in this house forty year," he said. "Bought it back in nineteen and forty-three for four thousand dollar. Bet you never heard of a house that cheap. Now it's worth one hunnert and fifteen thousand. Just the lot we're settin' on. That don't even count the house. They can knock

Good news for me, although even in Texas I don't think impersonating a maid would be classified as a crime.

I tend to place kids in a class with dogs, preferring the quiet, the smart, and the well trained.

How can you trust someone who doesn't bother to spell correctly or can't manage to lay out a simple declarative sentence?

Nothing wrong with being single when you can do as you please without objection or complaint.

Where does it say that being a couple is a measure of anything?

This was because his badge was attached to his belt in close proximity to his fly, and I didn't want to seem too interested. "Sorry to barge in unannounced," he went on.

I don't want to write formula. I don't want to crank these books out like sausages. Every book is different, which takes a hell of a lot of ingenuity on my part.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

Of the first seven novels I wrote, numbers four and five were published. Numbers one, two, three, six, and seven, have never seen the light of day... and rightly so.

It is a truth of human nature that we can ponder life's mysteries for only so long before we lose interest and move on to something else.

You can't make anyone love you and you can't stop anyone from dying.