Quotes from Edna Buchanan

Books are like your children. They take nine months to write; the manuscript weighs six pounds and...you send them out into the world and hope that some day they'll send back money.

A young city, Miami lacks the history, the roots, and the traditions of other major metropolitan areas. Everybody here is from someplace else.

She is always optimistic and resourceful, a woman who, if cast ashore alone on a desert island, would build a house with a guest room.

To entrust to an editor a story over which you have labored and to which your name and reputation are attached can be like sending your daughter off for an evening with Ted Bundy.

Love is so fragile and so often fatal. I am amazed when people are brave enough to risk it.

The past is an unsolved mystery and the truth a moving target.

Life is a continuum. The soul is all that's permanent. Death is a rebirth. Leaves and birds come back, so does the soul. We all have a life cycle. It's nature, part of the universe, part of everything around us.

The most important thing a writer can do is to keep writing, even when the muse is elusive and the words don't come.

Where is Prince Charming? What ever happened to happily ever after? Why is it that a man who is unhappy with a woman--a man who may neglect, abuse or abandon her--cannot bear to see her happy alone or with someone else? That manner of macho is decidedly unattractive.

Some people ask if I regret not having a family. Not at all. Some women are cut out to be mommies. Some are superwomen with the stamina to do it all. I am not one of them. My elementary school math teacher was right: I would have been a lousy housewife. Instead I am lucky enough to work and interact with talented and stimulating people on a job where no day is ever the same as any other. And I get to touch thousands of people in some way.

The greatest gift a writer can give himself is permission to write badly.

The most dangerous stories are the ones that never get told.

Men give love because they want sex. Women give sex because they want love. That's the difference between men and women. Ever notice how when we talk about our love lives, it's always about a man? Singular. All most of us want is one good man. But when men talk, it's about women. Plural. They want as many as they can get.

Most men are not secure enough to love a woman who packs a gun, wears a badge, and can put people in jail. Unmarried policewomen tell me that the men with courage enough to ask for a date often prove to be weirdos with strange ideas, some of them relating to handcuffs and uniforms.

You know how women are, specially ' bout cops. Guns and badges are babe magnets.

Everybody seems normal, till you get to know them.

Sex gets people killed, put in jail, beaten up, bankrupted, and disgraced, to say nothing of ruined -- personally, politically, and professionally. Looking for sex can lead to misfortune, and if you get lucky and find it, it can leave you maimed, infected, or dead. Other than that, it's swell: the great American pastime.

True friends are those who really know you but love you anyway.

You can't be what you can't see.

reporters bumping into

No, I work for the newspaper, the Miami News. The hip-hopper's stare was blank. "What channel?" The future of my chosen profession looked bleak.

The man at the keyboard frowned. The green dot moved with the car, miles away. I watched the three detectives glued to the screen. This, I thought, is the police work of the future

In the criminal justice system you see the worst people on their best behavior, unlike the civil system, where the best people behave at their worst.

When I was young, journalism was all about the five double-yews: Where, When, Why, What, and Who. Today it's about the gees: Garbage and Gossip.