Top 124 Quotes & Sayings by George Pelecanos

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author George Pelecanos.

Last updated on December 22, 2024.

George P. Pelecanos is an American author. Many of his 20 books are in the genre of detective fiction and set primarily in his hometown of Washington, D.C. He is also a film and television producer and a television writer. On television, he frequently collaborates with David Simon, writing multiple episodes of Simon's HBO series The Wire and Treme, and is also the co-creator of the HBO series The Deuce and We Own This City.

American - Author | Born: February 18, 1957

Source: Wikipedia

I never took a writing class.

George Pelecanos

My senior year at College Park, University of Maryland, I took an elective class in crime fiction taught by Charles C. Mish. He turned me on in a big way to reading and books. I was lucky to have a teacher who changed the course of my life.

George Pelecanos

Reading opens your mind and helps you understand and empathize with people who are unlike you and outside your breadth of experience.

George Pelecanos

I really feel like people who want to change things need to go out and change it themselves and not look to politicians to do that.

George Pelecanos

At 11 years old, in 1968, my job was to deliver food on foot, so I spent my day walking around the city. I had an active imagination, jacked up by movies. I passed the time making up stories and serializing them.

George Pelecanos

Movies were the biggest influence on me when I was a kid.

George Pelecanos

A lot of guys are walking around with a lot simmering beneath the surface, and sometimes it explodes.

George Pelecanos

I'm forever grateful to have had the opportunity to prove myself to my dad. After I took over the diner, the look in my father's eyes went from disappointment to respect.

George Pelecanos

Incarcerated individuals want what most people want in a novel: good, honest writing and a story well told.

George Pelecanos

I don't judge anyone of any stripe by what they read. Reading is always good for you. It's a positive act.

George Pelecanos

I owned a '70 Camaro for many years, which I loved.

George Pelecanos

People want to see the world the way they want to see it, not the way it is.

George Pelecanos

I used to sit in my pickup truck at 7 o'clock in the morning outside my office and listen to the Replacements or something full blast, thinking, 'What am I doing here?'

George Pelecanos

Every young man's best purchase is his first car, which spells freedom. My first one was a '70 Camaro, springtime gold-over-saddle, a 307 with Hi-jackers and chrome reverse mags.

George Pelecanos

There's a room in my house where my stereo, records, CDs, and books are housed. I spend a lot of time in that room, sitting in my chair beside the fireplace, reading and listening to music. Sometimes I just stand before the shelves and look at my books, because every single one of them means something to me.

George Pelecanos

If I had my druthers, I wouldn't have anyone's words in my script but my own, but if you want complete autonomy, just stick to novels.

George Pelecanos

There's nothing funny about violence. Death is a real thing.

George Pelecanos

It would probably surprise people how prevalent reading is in institutions - and the degree to which some states discourage reading by instituting draconian rules and laws that try to limit and outright roadblock books in prisons.

George Pelecanos

I am on my bike daily, and most of the locations, warehouses and specific residences from 'The Cut' were found while I was riding.

George Pelecanos

Richmond Fontaine bandleader Willy Vlautin writes songs akin to finely composed short stories set in the diners, bars, casinos, and old hotels of Reno and its environs.

George Pelecanos

My books are not for everybody.

George Pelecanos

I always overtip. When I go to England, people think I'm stupid.

George Pelecanos

Where I live, there are a lot of businesses owned by Ethiopians and Eritreans. They're the new immigrants, the new Greeks - what my people did. The next generation of these people will probably be college graduates. That's how it works, right there in front of your eyes.

George Pelecanos

My favorite movies are from the '70s.

George Pelecanos

I'm intrigued by people who make their modest living doing good things for others. Teachers, nonprofit workers, librarians... those are the heroes in our society.

George Pelecanos

I do miss the Chocolate City of my youth.

George Pelecanos

I was heavily into John D. MacDonald.

George Pelecanos

I read 'The Washington Post' every day from a very young age. Reading the newspaper taught me how to organize my thoughts on the page. Meaning, it taught me how to write.

George Pelecanos

I collect and read as many books about music and film as I do fiction.

George Pelecanos

'The Deuce' came about when David Simon and I were put in contact with a guy who, along with his twin brother, owned a couple bars in Times Square.

George Pelecanos

I want to be read. When you write a TV show like 'The Wire,' you've got three to four million readers watching your work. Even Grisham doesn't sell that many books.

George Pelecanos

After college, I spent a decade working the kinds of jobs that I write about - bartender, shoe salesman, kitchen man - while voraciously reading novels.

George Pelecanos

I didn't want to write the same book over and over.

George Pelecanos

There are a lot of bars and shoe stores in my early books.

George Pelecanos

'The Turnaround' isn't even really a crime novel. But you need conflict to make a novel, any kind of novel, and I don't know any other way to do it than crime.

George Pelecanos

I've just been very interested in the living side of Washington, rather than the federal side, since I was a kid.

George Pelecanos

I can't relax. I don't have any hobbies.

George Pelecanos

There is nothing like the rumble of a dual-piped American car with something under the hood.

George Pelecanos

My goal is to get better with each book, and I feel like I am.

George Pelecanos

For many years, I did ride-alongs with patrol cops, which is any citizen's right.

George Pelecanos

I was really rudderless at one point my life. And once I started reading books, then I got the idea that maybe I could become a writer. I had a goal. And every day when I got up, there was a reason.

George Pelecanos

'The Deuce' takes a look at the remarkable paradigm of capitalism and labor: where money goes and how it's routed; who has power and who doesn't; who is exploited and who's not.

George Pelecanos

My father was a Marine who fought in the Pacific in WW II. He was a very tough guy, but after the war, he lived his life in a quiet and reserved manner because he had nothing to prove. I know now that he internalized his war experience.

George Pelecanos

I had met many wounded veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center when I was researching my 2009 novel 'The Turnaround,' and I continue to be very interested in how returning servicemen and women deal with their new lives back home and how they're treated by America.

George Pelecanos

Can't get my head around sci-fi or fantasy. I'm not putting those genres down; it's just that I'm not built for them.

George Pelecanos

'Treme' begins after Hurricane Katrina, and it's a year-by-year account of how everyday people there put their lives back together. It's sort of a testament to, or an argument for why, a great American city like New Orleans needs to be saved and preserved.

George Pelecanos

The cliche is that Washington is a transient town of people who blow in and out every four years with the new administrations. But the reality is that people have lived in Washington for generations, and their lives are worth examining, I think.

George Pelecanos

I even dream about writing. I'm talking seeing words across the page, whole paragraphs.

George Pelecanos

I never went to school for writing, never took a writing class, but when you're in a room with David Simon and Ed Burns and Dennis Lehane and Richard Price, and they're going over something you've written, you learn what works and what doesn't.

George Pelecanos

I like fiction set in the South, and I'm a fan of literary westerns.

George Pelecanos

When I was 19, my dad got sick, and I quit college to take over his business, a coffee shop on 19th Street, below Dupont Circle in D.C. I had been working there since I was 11 years old, so it was not a stretch to think that I could do it, but my record as a teenager, in many respects, was less than stellar.

George Pelecanos

I shoot occasionally, but I'm no gun expert.

George Pelecanos

My goal is to get a real film industry started in Washington. An actual one, not where features come to town and shoot second unit for a few days. I would love to get something started here. Hire local crews. People could work year-round and raise their families here.

George Pelecanos

Sometimes I think 'The Wire' said it all, and I might as well not write any more crime novels.

George Pelecanos

I'm always working on my next novel, even when I'm not.

George Pelecanos

Sometimes there's a reason for the hype.

George Pelecanos

'Random Rules' kicks off 'American Water,' and from its opening line - 'In 1984 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection' - you know you're in for something strange and special.

George Pelecanos

I make a good spaghetti sauce and can mix a nice drink.

George Pelecanos

My dad used to call me 'the dreamer.' He was right.

George Pelecanos

'The Big Sky' is an American classic.

George Pelecanos