Top 178 Quotes & Sayings by Michael Connelly - Page 3

My grandparents were all born in the U.S., but their parents came from Ireland.

I'm one hundred percent Irish, and I'm very proud that I'm Irish American, though I don't know exactly where my ancestors came from. I just know County Cork.

I write puzzles and mysteries. Nothing too highfalutin.

I wanted to learn about the worlds I wanted to write about in fiction.

Writing a screenplay is so spare, it kind of reminded me that I really should celebrate what I can do in a book, which is description: for example, places, people, locations.

Keeping your head down and just writing is only part of the equation, so I surround myself with smart people to help sell my books.

I connect to the tradition of Irish storytelling. And I think there is something - I can't put my finger on it - something genetic there. Maybe just a need to tell stories.

The three books I've written in Florida about L.A. are my best takes on the physicality of the city, as far as description goes.

Can't complain because nobody listens.

The Chicago Way is a wonderful first novel. Michael Harvey has studied the masters and put his own unique touch on the crime novel. This book harkens the arrival of a major new voice.

Everybody counts or nobody counts

It's only a wonderful world if you can make it that way. There are no street signs pointing to Paradise Road.

There is a means to every end. A root to any cause. Sometimes the root is more evil than any cause, though it's the cause that is usually most vilified.

No Way Back is my kind of novel - a tough, taut thriller - Mofina knows the world he writes about.

I'm a pretty harsh critic when it comes to my own stuff or things that come from my work.

Money. The ultimate motivation. The ultimate way of keeping score.

The writing ethic was influenced - when you have to write every day, there's no such thing as writer's block.

I would change very little because I have been very, very fortunate. A lot of things fell into place for me simply by happenstance. When that happens you don't really want to change anything, even if you could. Editorially my regrets are few and for the most part minor. I look back on my first published book and think I held on to it too long, babied it too long.

Maybe it has something to do with being a reporter for a long time that I don't look to newspapers and television and so forth for inspiration most of the time.

How I work is that I write a story I'd like to read. Then you fly to Paris or Sydney and the interviewers talk about the greater significance of your work.

What is jealousy but a reflection of your own failures?

You can fall in love and make love many times but there is only one bullet with your name etched on the side. And if you are lucky enough to be shot with that bullet then the wound never heals.

Well, did he do it?" She always asked the irrelevant question. It didn't matter in terms of the strategy of the case whether the defendant "did it" or not. What mattered was the evidence against him -- the proof -- and if and how it could be neutralized. My job was to bury the proof, to color the proof a shade of gray. Gray was the color of reasonable doubt.

I'm not 'Mr. No-By-The-Book.' I just want to make sure the character is by the book.

In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is equalized with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that's in the long run. We must live in the short run and matters are often unjust there. The compensating for us of the universe makes all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process.

I view people two ways. They're either eye-for-an-eye people or they are turn-the-cheek people.

I've learned over the years that sometimes if you ask the same question more than once you get different responses.

Las Vegas was like that. There was a visceral attraction here. The bold promise of money and sex. But the first was a broken promise, a mirage, and the second was fraught with danger, expense, physical and mental risk. It was where the real gambling took place in this town.

What is important is not what you hear said, it's what you observe.

You can't patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.

The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers' bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.

Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really droppped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically -- any way you want to look at it -- everbody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case.

As a bassist he could never really be a sideman. He was always the anchor. He drove the beat. even if it was behind Miles Davis'a horn.

Any writer would rather dig into character than dig into fancy plots.

When I am so intensely involved with writing my books I don't like to reread them.

Ingeniously plotted and executed, Print the Legend is an epic masterpiece from Craig McDonald. Beginning to end, I was riveted by this story of character, history and intrigue.

There were a billion lights out there on the horizon and I knew that all of them put together weren't enough to light the darkness in the hearts of some men.

She refused to accept the simple truism that the better you were, the bigger threat you were to those at the top.

You know you're going to get burned from time to time. It's just part of the game. So when it happens you have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and forget about it because they're about to snap the ball again.

There is no end of things in the heart. ...she understood it to mean that if you took something to heart, really brought it inside those red velvet folds, then it would always be there for you. No matter what happened, it would be there waiting. She said this could mean a person, a place, a dream. A mission. Anything sacred. She told me that it is all connected in those secret folds. Always. It is all part of the same and will always be there, carrying the same beat as your heart.

There is nothing you can do about the past except keep it there.

Momentum was momentum, whether you found it in music or on the street or in the beat of your own heart.

The best crime novels are not about how a detective works on a case; they are about how a case works on a detective.

...it is how a person goes about quenching his desires or living with them unrequited that the readers get a glimpse of his true character.

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more.

I saw a sneak preview of Jack Reacher and give two thumbs up to Tom Cruise. He did a great job with the role.

The character can never be static from book to book. People might think you just come up with a new plot and stick this guy in. Well, he has to be as new as the plot every time.

There is nothing like the start of a season, before all the one-run losses, pitching breakdowns and missed opportunities. Before reality sets in.

A really good day for me is to write my book for about four hours, go to the writing room for about four hours and then maybe come back to the book to finish the day for a few more hours of it.

The built-in form is a window frame. You can use this genre [crime fiction] to go where you want to go, and explore what you want to explore. In some ways it gives you a lot of freedom because you have a framework readers are looking for.

When I was a teenager, I was a voracious reader of crime fiction, but only contemporary books.

I was enamored of detectives as a teenager. I liked what they did - piecing things together, thinking about situations. But to get there? Eight to ten years in a patrol car? I didn't have that in me. I didn't want to tell people what to do.

It’s lucky no one else knows what our most secret thoughts are. We’d all be seen for the cunning, self-aggrandizing fools we are.

To write more from memory and to be more creative - I think - because I am still writing about Los Angeles but I can't walk out my door and immediately drive to places I am writing about. So I think it has been a very good change for me after 11 books to start writing this way.

If the system turns away from the abuses inflicted on the guilty, then who can be next but the innocents?

Don't go growing a conscience on me," I said. "I've been down that road. It doesn't lead you to anything good.

There is no client as scary as an innocent man.

Action and adventure on land and sea-you can't ask for more. But Robert Kurson raises the ante in Pirate Hunters with an array of mystery and a fleet of colorful characters spanning four centuries. This is a great summer read!