Top 55 Michael Connelly Quotes

That’s the irony in the work: the best stories are the worst things that happen. My best times were somebody else’s worst.

My whole reputation and creative thought as a novelist is really wrapped around Harry Bosch, so he’s near and dear.

One of the great things about fiction is you can use an issue and describe it in human terms.

I hate people thinking their city is unique, but there is a certain aura about Los Angeles; it’s not necessarily a beautiful thing, but it’s part of Harry Bosch.

I think there has to be an empathic strike between the reader and the protagonist. There has to be something said or known that connects the reader to this person you’re going to ride through the story with.

When I went home at 20 to tell my parents, ‘I don’t want to be an engineer, I want to try and write books,’ I was braced for, ‘That’s not gonna happen.’ But I didn’t get that response, and maybe it was because of my dad’s experience of having an artistic dream and having to put it aside.

I love movies. Movies have influenced me as a writer.

Being a journalist always makes you a quick study of wherever you’re at. You’re out all the time and seeing places that normally you wouldn’t get to see. It gives you an unusual level of insight into any place.

In ‘Blood Work,’ they made choices I wouldn’t have made, but I’m not a filmmaker. I took the money, and they told the story.

I not only read Raymond Chandler but read all the crime fiction classics. I was hooked.

My experience as a newspaper reporter was invaluable in terms of getting me to the kind of writing I do now. It gave me a work ethic of writing every day and pushing through difficult creative times. I mean, there’s no writer’s block allowed in a newsroom.

The characters I write about are very internal.

I think the best way to sell a made-up character is to plant his feet into the real earth.

I think there’d be huge losses if there weren’t newspapers. I know everything’s shifting to the Internet and some people would say, ‘News is news, what you’re talking about is a change of consumption, not the product that’s out there.’ But I think there is a change.

I’ve been able to write at least one book a year for 20 years, and I don’t think I would’ve had that kind of drive if I hadn’t come out of the journalism business.

I’ve crossed the Mexican border and gone to Tijuana a few times over the years, but I’ve never felt comfortable there.

In the TV world, we are seeing a lot more power going to the writer. I sense it is a writer’s medium.

I’d be lying if I said the success means nothing to me. It does. I enjoy it and live a pretty great life.

I’m always looking at ways of shaking up the writing experience because I think it helps.

I think the only boundaries are individual and personal. A writer should be free to write about anything he or she wants to, including the twin towers. I have made small references to 9/11 in my past two books.

I’m just going to write the best books I can.

In the real world, some defense lawyers never have an innocent client in their whole career.

We want our government to protect us, to make sure something like 9/11 never happens again. We quickly moved to give law enforcement more power to do this. But that now begs the question, did we move to fast? Did we give too much power away? I don’t have the answer.

That’s what I like most about writing fiction over journalism: the easy metaphors!

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

I don’t miss being a reporter as a job, but I do miss the everyday interaction with the front line of law enforcement. I still have a cadre of cops who keep me up to date, but I don’t have the access I used to.

To get a connection to your characters, you have to put them in a situation that you can feel yourself.

As a former reporter, I wrote ‘The Scarecrow’ quickly – I didn’t have to think about what the character would do the way I do with Harry Bosch.

The act of reading a story is sacred, and people build images and all that stuff.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.

I have a large collection of biographies about jazz musicians.

I write my books never thinking of an actor.

I admit my reading time is limited because I can write in the situations and places where people usually read. But reading is the fuel – it’s inspiring – so I try to keep the tank full. What happens most of the time is I binge read. I will put aside a day or two to do nothing but read.

I used to tape over the top corner of my computer screen so I couldn’t see what time it was. I like the idea that I’m just with the words and not knowing what’s going on with the world, when it’s lunch or dinner.

As a writer, you look for inspiration wherever you can get it.

I don’t put a lot of description in the books because I write books the way I like to read them, and that is I like to build images and be a creative reader, and so I write that way.

Artists are supposed to stay hungry.

I was a police reporter, so I got into the worlds that I write about, and I think many of the details in my books come from those days.

Now I’m writing about contemporary Los Angeles from memory. My process was to hang out, observe, research what I was writing about, and almost immediately go back to my office and write those sections. So it was a very close transfer between observation and writing.

I write puzzles and mysteries. Nothing too highfalutin.

Deep in my heart it still feels like I’m a journalist even though I haven’t worked for a paper and carried a press pass for 14 years.

You have to write about what scares you.

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 realize now I could have gotten a whole book out of that and so I think that was a big mistake. But the truth is you write in the moment and with your head down and there is no way back then that I could have conceived of Harry having the longevity that he has had.

The books I’ve written the fastest were the best reviewed and sold the best.

I write at a pace that suits me, and sometimes it’s two books a year, but most often it’s one.

I’d seen Titus Welliver in a few shows and felt he had some inner demons in his portrayals, as does Harry Bosch.

My father was a builder. During my high school years, I worked for him. One summer, I was working with a guy who had just come back from Vietnam and had been a tunnel rat. He wouldn’t talk about the experience, but it sounded really scary to me.

When I write about Mickey Haller as the Lincoln lawyer, I totally see Matthew McConaughey because he took that character when that character was still fairly new to me – only two or three years old – when I knew McConaughey was going to play him. He’s also the same age, the right age, in comparison to the book.

I watched ‘Kojak’ religiously with my father. It was a great bonding time. He loved shows where the stakes were high. Life and death, justice prevailing, things like that. I think that helped set me on the path to what I do now.

With age comes a greater understanding and a greater worldview.

A good day to me is writing from 6 A.M. ’til noon with a break to take my daughter to school. After lunch, if I still feel the momentum, I’ll hit it again.

I was fired as an actor on ‘Bosch.’

I got lucky, and the first book, ‘The Black Echo,’ got published.

In writing on the page, you can be a bit elliptical, but on TV, you can’t dance around stuff. You either show it, or you don’t.