"Initially, the only thing that mattered to me - I was too young to understand the politics of the day - was that there was a woman who was covering the NFL. I asked my mom if I could be a sportscaster when I grew up. My mom was an adventurous spirit herself. Much to my mom's credit, she said, "Yes, you can." It didn't matter to her that no other women were doing it at the time. It didn't matter to her that there was a double standard. It just mattered that her daughter had a dream and she was going to help her pursue that."

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I'm very objective about what I want to have happen to my protagonists and where that has to come from. On one hand, it does help me that I had a mother who might have taken the last dollar and bought a pack of cigarettes or something, but I also had a mother who exposed me to art, music, other religions, different foods. My mother was very adventurous in her own way, so she fed the part of me that was going to grow up to be a writer. But there's always, too, the opposite response that helps me to create.

— Rita Williams-Garcia