A Quote by Patti Smith

I watch a lot of crime shows. The head investigator always said to the crime solver, "What do you say?" And inevitably the other has to say something like, "Well I'm thinking he was shot in the neck with a certain gun and he seemed to be running." The solver has to picture what he's seeing first, and then express his own observations. The writer does the same.
Some of the best movies made about crime are those where the crime solver can get inside the head of the serial killer, and those are the techniques we use in C.S.I.
Once I got interested in organized crime, and, specifically, Jewish organized crime, I got very interested in it. I have learned that, like my narrator Hannah, I'm a crime writer in my own peculiar way. Crime with a capital "C" is the subject that I'm stuck with - even Sway is about "crime" in a certain way. The nice thing about crime is that it enables you to deal with some big questioO
If you ask people if they enjoy crime novels, they'll say, 'Oh, my guilty pleasure is...' then name a really brilliant crime writer.
If you are passed out drunk or if there is a gun to your head, it is the same crime. It is a crime where there is not consent. It is a felony. And we need to start making sure victims understand that, so they don't do the self blame.
I think there is a lot of crime caused by desperation, and it doesn't mean that people commit crime because they're poor, but certainly a lot of people who are poor commit crime and they might not if they weren't poor. You understand the difference there? That's not news, but it comes up when I hear people say poverty doesn't affect crime - that crime is still going down in America even though the economy is bad.
I always say that, like a scientist or anyone, you always want to be the problem-solver. You feel like, if you solve the greatest mystery or the greatest problem, then that makes you brilliant. It's the same thing with an actress. You want to be able to really tackle a character and make it a fully-dimensional human being who is complicated, funny and all the things that a person could be.
In England, if you commit a crime, the police don't have a gun and you don't have a gun. If you commit a crime, the police will say 'Stop, or I'll say stop again.'
We are not prepared to consider special category status for certain groups of people serving sentences for crime. Crime is crime is crime, it is not political
If I had admitted my guilt, it would have been the same as putting my head on the chopping block - lifetime ban. Death penalty. I spent my entire life on the baseball fields of America, and I was not going to give up my profession without first seeing some hard evidence ... right or wrong, the punishment didn't fit the crime, so I denied the crime.
I love you, Eliza,” I said. She thought about it. “No,” she said at last, “I don’t like it.” “Why not?” I said. “It’s as though you were pointing a gun at my head,” she said. “It’s just a way of getting somebody to say something they probably don’t mean. What else can I say, or anybody say, but, ‘I love you, too’?
In everything I've written, the crime has always just been an occasion to write about other things. I don't have a picture of myself as writing crime novels. I like fairly strong narratives, but it's a way of getting a plot moving.
There's so much that goes into a film that I feel like it's a bit arrogant to say, 'Oh, I never watch my own movies.' Well, it's not just you. There's a whole host of other people. So much skill goes into it. But I would say it does take a couple times seeing it to get a level of perspective.
If a cop sees a person running out of a store with a gun he's seeing a crime. He's not seeing a person standing.
One of my strengths as a writer is that I'm a good problem-solver. I write these unthinking, ungoverned first drafts. The project for me always is to turn that instinctive stuff into pages that work.
I know a lot of crime writers feel very underrated, like they're not taken seriously, and they want to be just thought of as writers rather than ghettoised as crime writers, but I love being thought of firmly as a crime writer.
The best crime stories are always about the crime and its consequences - you know, 'Crime And Punishment' is the classic. Where you have the crime, and its consequences are the story, but considering the crime and the consequences makes you think about the society in which the crime takes place, if you see what I mean.
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