Words matter. These are the best Don Winslow Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
Police work in major cities – and New York is no exception – has always been vulnerable to corruption. Teddy Roosevelt built his career on it.
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 would prefer things to be peaceful and not have conflict.
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.
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?
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.
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.
There are various kinds of savagery: emotional, spiritual, economic, and cultural savagery.
A great review is great. A bad review is the worst.
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?
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.
I start work at 5 in the morning and I have a wicked insomnia problem.
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.
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.
My problem is not that there are too few ideas out there. It’s that there are too many.
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.
I have to remind the people who put down East Coast surfing that Kelly Slater is from Florida.
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.
By any objective standard, Joaquin Guzman Loera is an evil man who has caused untold suffering for others.
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.
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.
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.
