Top 72 Quotes & Sayings by Don Winslow

I get started at 5:30 in the morning and write till 10 A.M. Then I hike six or seven miles before going back to work.

I was a safari guide in the 1980s in Kenya.

As a novelist, you have to realise that the novel and the film have to live separate lives. They're just different, like your kids, even if they look alike.

As a surfer, I think of places like a wave: you see one thing on the surface. But you always know there's something different going on underneath.

Well, if you're writing a thriller, you have to have your character in mortal jeopardy on page 1 or it's not a thriller.

Producing words isn't a problem for me. And I usually write two books at a time. When one horse gets winded, you jump on the other.

My earliest influence was Shakespeare - I read Shakespeare incessantly as a kid.

Police departments are always a reflection of the society that they serve. Is there such a thing as 'police culture?' Absolutely. Is that culture isolated form the surrounding society? Absolutely not.

The tragedy is that the police and inner city communities should be allies. Who suffers most from violent crime in America? Inner city communities. Who has a personal and professional interest in lowering that violence? Cops.

As a writer, when you fall in love with a place, you want to spend more time in it, either physically or mentally, and so you write about it.

I've been around the surf culture since I was a kid. I grew up in a beach town in Rhode Island. Then eventually I lived in Dana Point, Calif., a real surf hotbed.

I used to joke that my next book would be about puppies that have lost a chew toy, and everywhere they went, people were nice and gave them things until they found the chew toy.

I have to remind the people who put down East Coast surfing that Kelly Slater is from Florida.

When you criminalize something, only criminals can deal with it. When criminals deal with it, there's no recourse to law, so there's only recourse to violence.

My problem is not that there are too few ideas out there. It's that there are too many.

So I thought I should write five pages a day. And that's what I did. Eventually I had a book.

You have to avoid what I call the 'smartest boy in class syndrome,' which is, just because you know it, you don't have to tell it. I often will go through a manuscript crossing stuff out, and say, 'This is just too much,' you know?

By any objective standard, Joaquin Guzman Loera is an evil man who has caused untold suffering for others.

I was trying in 'The Power of the Dog' to write a brutally accurate in-your-face, if you will, description of 30 years in the war on drugs. And the effect that that had on people.

The novelist is the vestigial bone on the body cinema. We're like the little toe that can be cut off.

Police work in major cities - and New York is no exception - has always been vulnerable to corruption. Teddy Roosevelt built his career on it.

There are various kinds of savagery: emotional, spiritual, economic, and cultural savagery.

As someone who has researched and written about the Mexican cartels and the futile 'war on drugs' for coming on twenty years, I know how tough a subject it is. Mind-bending, soul-warping, heartbreaking, it challenges your intellect, your beliefs, your faith in humanity and God.

The bridge to Coronado Island off San Diego was built because the mob had a hotel there and needed a way to get people out there.

You know, I mean this sincerely, you know, I'm so grateful that I get to get up in the morning and do this, you know, and write books.

I was very influenced by films and books like 'Serpico,' 'The French Connection,' and 'Prince of the City.' They were some of the reasons I became a crime writer.

I think we need to rethink our ideas about what policing is and should be. I think we need to rethink our ideas about the criminal justice system as a whole, including the hysterically named corrections system. I mean, what's being corrected? Look, none of it's working.

Don't kid yourself: The justice system is a business. It's about money.

I start work at 5 in the morning and I have a wicked insomnia problem.

A great review is great. A bad review is the worst.

In the first place, it's surreal to watch filming, to see the little ideas you had in your head and now Taylor Kitsch is doing it, or Salma Hayek. And then to see it loud and bright onscreen is a trip.

We always think of borders as something that separates two peoples but of course they unite them. It's something you have in common, literally.

If Trump was really looking for Mexicans to pay for the wall, he should put in a call to Sinaloa. They'd probably build it for him.

I would prefer things to be peaceful and not have conflict.

A writer who doesn't need the money gains power and is dangerous in a negotiation.

I lived in mafia neighborhoods off and on when I was a kid. If you were in Little Italy, in East Harlem, in Brooklyn... Those neighborhoods were, in those years, dominated by mafia families. You knew it and you felt it, you know?

It's funny because I think that genre literature can be looked down on by literature literature. And I like that! I like being scorned; I like people looking down their noses at us a little bit... It gives us a little chip on our shoulder.

For a while, many years ago, my job was to get mugged. My job was to walk around Times Square trying to get a mugger to attack me so that someone else could come in and arrest the mugger.

We have contradictory expectations of police: We want to be perfectly safe and perfectly free. We want total security and total privacy. We want the bad guys stopped and the good guys unmolested. That's great for the consumer; try providing it.

I think you can use fiction to get inside people's minds.

I don't recognize myself. I don't know who I am anymore." And it's all fun and games until someone loses an I.

I try to pay attention to language. I think that as a general rule, we as writers talk too much and we should listen more. I read my dialogue out loud to myself because I think that's when you catch the wrong notes and the wrong tones.

The Force deals a lot with the heroin epidemic, which I'm sorry to know people are experiencing in Canada.

Alcoholism, tobacco, drunk driving, these things will always be with us. There's always going to be a certain percentage of any population that is addicted to certain substances.

And the most dangerous place on earth - Is where you’re safe.

I never think about a movie when I'm writing a book, because I think only two things could happen and both of them are bad. You write a lousy novel and a lousy film.

What happened with the opioid epidemic is the Mexican cartels made a very deliberate, corporate decision to undercut the price of opioids. What they discovered was they could increase production, increase potency and decrease the price, and sell it for a third of what the Big Pharma could, or street dealers could, for Big Pharma pills. North America, and to a slightly lesser extent Europe, is being flooded with this Mexican heroin as a direct result of the attempt to undercut American pharmaceutical companies.

With a 660-page book, you don't read every sentence aloud. I am terrified for the poor guy doing the audio book. But I do because I think we hear them aloud even if it's not an audio book. The other goofy thing I do is I examine the shape of the words but not the words themselves. Then I ask myself, "Does it look like what it is?" If it's a sequence where I want to grab the reader and not let the reader go then it needs to look dense. But at times I want the reader to focus on a certain word or a certain image and pause there.

Ridley Scott obviously an iconic director, he's made some fantastic films. Obviously a very smart, very tasteful, thoughtful guy. So yeah, I'm in good shape; got Ridley Scott with The Cartel.

Bookstores never seem to know where to put me on the shelves. But I do. I love my genre and I love those writers, so I am happy to be considered a crime writer. That's what I consider myself.

How much more money do we have to waste, how many more families have to be destroyed, how many more people have to be killed before you summon the courage to tell the truth to the American people?

The devil's in the details. The way I view my job is to bring the reader into a world they otherwise could not enter and let them see it through the character's eyes. And you can only do that with detail. The details make the characters distinct from one another. If you can give them those little grace notes, those little touches, that's what makes the reader relate.

If you let people believe that you are weak, sooner or later you’re going to have to kill them.

Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart.

I was researching some of the modern-day figures that The Sopranos were moulded on. So many iconic Sopranos moments. James Gandolfini and Edie Falco had an incredible scene together in the kitchen of that house that looked like it was about to explode. That was an iconic series that changed the way we did television. It is also an extremely realistic portrayal of the mafia. Much more so than The Godfather. The Godfather, one of the greatest films ever, but let's face it, a romanticized version of the mob.

I have a life, I have a wife. I have an adult son who I'm very close to, and friends. I go hiking almost every day, four to six miles. In the summer, I'm out surfing or swimming. I think that real, human relationships with people mostly balance dark places in my work.

My grandmother was from Guelph, Ont. I grew up playing ice hockey, I'm a massive fan. A great-uncle who was in the early days of the NHL played for the Chicago Blackhawks.

American cops are the ones who are in the emergency rooms. They're the ones who go to the morgues. They're the ones who have to go tell the families that their son is not coming back, their husband, their wife, is not coming home that night. So when we talk about guns and gun violence and police, let's understand that as well. No one wants guns off the streets more than cops because cops are killed by those guns.

I think one of the problems with being a fiction writer these days is that you can't keep up with the headlines. Things that people would say are absurd occur the next day or they come out of somebody's mouth. There are days I just wanna give up.

You watch Jeff Sessions testifying in front of Congress, Jesus, like watching an amnesiac: "I don't recall," "I don't remember," "I don't recall," "I don't remember," "I don't remember what I don't recall," "I recall what I don't remember." Amazing.