"I'm a daydreamer"
About this Quote
Calling yourself a daydreamer is a small act of self-definition that quietly refuses the hustle-era demand to be relentlessly pragmatic. In Sara Paretsky's mouth, it reads less like airy whimsy and more like a working method: the writer as someone who lives in the gap between what is and what could be, training her attention on possibilities the “realists” miss.
Paretsky is best known for V.I. Warshawski, a hard-boiled private investigator navigating Chicago’s corruption, money, and gendered power. That context matters because “daydreamer” is a term often used to diminish women as unserious, distracted, not built for the grit of the world. Paretsky flips it into an engine. The subtext is: imagination isn’t escapism; it’s reconnaissance. To write crime fiction that exposes institutional rot, you have to speculate, connect patterns, and picture motives that aren’t yet visible. Daydreaming becomes a disciplined form of dissent.
The line also carries an autobiographical undertone: Paretsky came up in a literary culture that treated genre work as second-class and women’s anger as impolite. “I’m a daydreamer” is a disarming soft tone that masks a harder claim to authority. It signals creative freedom while smuggling in a challenge to gatekeepers who equate seriousness with a narrow kind of realism.
Its power is its simplicity. No manifesto, no argument - just a label that reframes the supposed flaw (drifting) as the source of vision.
Paretsky is best known for V.I. Warshawski, a hard-boiled private investigator navigating Chicago’s corruption, money, and gendered power. That context matters because “daydreamer” is a term often used to diminish women as unserious, distracted, not built for the grit of the world. Paretsky flips it into an engine. The subtext is: imagination isn’t escapism; it’s reconnaissance. To write crime fiction that exposes institutional rot, you have to speculate, connect patterns, and picture motives that aren’t yet visible. Daydreaming becomes a disciplined form of dissent.
The line also carries an autobiographical undertone: Paretsky came up in a literary culture that treated genre work as second-class and women’s anger as impolite. “I’m a daydreamer” is a disarming soft tone that masks a harder claim to authority. It signals creative freedom while smuggling in a challenge to gatekeepers who equate seriousness with a narrow kind of realism.
Its power is its simplicity. No manifesto, no argument - just a label that reframes the supposed flaw (drifting) as the source of vision.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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