Top 27 Quotes & Sayings by Joseph Wambaugh

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Joseph Wambaugh.

Last updated on September 19, 2024.

Joseph Aloysius Wambaugh, Jr., is a best-selling American writer known for his fictional and nonfictional accounts of police work in the United States. Several of his early novels were set in Los Angeles, California, and its surroundings, and featured Los Angeles police officers as protagonists. He has been nominated for four Edgar Awards, and was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.

American - Writer | Born: January 22, 1937

Source: Wikipedia

The time has come for professional jurors.

Joseph Wambaugh

Probably 95 percent of the things that are written never get on the screen.

Joseph Wambaugh

Today, lawyers are attacking more; they're attacking everything. A good example is the O.J. Simpson case.

Joseph Wambaugh

You've got people who are looking at DNA evidence and other evidence like that and they're ignoring it.

Joseph Wambaugh

When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice.

Joseph Wambaugh

As a cop, I dealt with every kind of bum and criminal. They all have more integrity than some Hollywood people.

Joseph Wambaugh

What is it about the component of fire? People have written about it. People have wondered about it.

Joseph Wambaugh

The O.J. Simpson case, they had no understanding of that DNA evidence, and didn't want to.

Joseph Wambaugh

I'm sure I took some licks at the system, and at trials and lawyers in general. I've seen enough of them for so many years both as a cop and a defendant in defamation cases.

Joseph Wambaugh

When I interview people accused of capital offenses, I never even ask if they did it. I would consider that unprofessional.

Joseph Wambaugh

The Onion Field made a real writer. And then I knew it was over, I couldn't be a cop anymore.

Joseph Wambaugh

Every time I write a nonfiction book I get sued.

Joseph Wambaugh

I certainly believe it's over for the jury system, but we won't admit it for a while.

Joseph Wambaugh

I enjoy adapting my own work, or anybody's work. I like to adapt books.

Joseph Wambaugh

Jury selection is strictly an emotional process. They're looking for people they can manipulate. Both sides are.

Joseph Wambaugh

The serial arsonist is the most difficult to apprehend because the evidence is burned up.

Joseph Wambaugh

The Onion Field, that one got pretty close to me because I was a cop when it happened. I saw some of the indifference that my police department showed to the surviving officer.

Joseph Wambaugh

What I didn't know was that if I didn't stand with my back to the wall, Hollywood people would unscrew my ass and sell it down the river.

Joseph Wambaugh

Civil servants take forever to do anything.

Joseph Wambaugh

I hadn't done anything in six years; I was just vegetating.

Joseph Wambaugh

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

Joseph Wambaugh

If you take 67 brush fires times 10 years, that's almost 700 right there. Those brush fires are incredibly dangerous, all those homes going down proved that.

Joseph Wambaugh

I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again.

Joseph Wambaugh

I write a thousand words a day. Nothing will stop me, I mean nothing, until the book is finished. I'm disciplined in spite of myself.

Joseph Wambaugh

Perhaps it had nothing to do with sin and everything to do with sociopathy, that most incurable of human disorders because all so afflicted consider themselves blessed rather than cursed.

Joseph Wambaugh

I was never a wet-eyed, passionate writer; I was always a policeman.

Joseph Wambaugh

It`s corruption never been systemic, because a fish rots from the head

Joseph Wambaugh