Top 66 George Pelecanos Quotes

After college, I spent a decade working the kinds of jobs that I write about – bartender, shoe salesman, kitchen man – while voraciously reading novels.

I’d get off the set of ‘The Wire’ at 3 A.M. or even 4 A.M. and drive home to Washington to see my kids sleep and give them a kiss. I’d get up at 7 A.M., while the kids were still in bed, and drive back to Baltimore.

I do miss the Chocolate City of my youth.

Sometimes I think ‘The Wire’ said it all, and I might as well not write any more crime novels.

‘Treme’ begins after Hurricane Katrina, and it’s a year-by-year account of how everyday people there put their lives back together. It’s sort of a testament to, or an argument for why, a great American city like New Orleans needs to be saved and preserved.

I read ‘The Washington Post’ every day from a very young age. Reading the newspaper taught me how to organize my thoughts on the page. Meaning, it taught me how to write.

Richmond Fontaine bandleader Willy Vlautin writes songs akin to finely composed short stories set in the diners, bars, casinos, and old hotels of Reno and its environs.

I go to church for the cultural element. It’s where you go to see Greek people once a week. It’s real important to me, and I hope my children see they’re part of something bigger than just this family.

My sons are black, and my daughter is Latina.

In its rather clinical view of death, ‘True Grit’ rivals the hardboiled world of ‘Red Harvest’-era Dashiell Hammett and prefigures Cormac McCarthy by 20 years.

I’ve seen firsthand how books can change people’s lives. It happened to me.

I find ‘True Grit’ to be one of the very best American novels: It is a rousing adventure story and deeply perceptive about the makeup of the American character.

There are a lot of bars and shoe stores in my early books.

I used to sit in my pickup truck at 7 o’clock in the morning outside my office and listen to the Replacements or something full blast, thinking, ‘What am I doing here?’

I didn’t want to write the same book over and over.

I do feel like that’s what a writer does, is he goes into other people’s heads.

My senior year at College Park, University of Maryland, I took an elective class in crime fiction taught by Charles C. Mish. He turned me on in a big way to reading and books. I was lucky to have a teacher who changed the course of my life.

I live in a bigger house, but I still live in the neighbourhood I grew up in.

People like to talk to me. I don’t know why.

I’m always working on my next novel, even when I’m not.

There’s a science to brain development. The brains of teenage boys are crowded with impulse and adrenaline. By the time they hit their 20s, their brains are dominated by conscience and reason.

I am on my bike daily, and most of the locations, warehouses and specific residences from ‘The Cut’ were found while I was riding.

There was a hole in Washington fiction, I felt, when I started out. Most D.C. novels were about politics or the federal city or people who lived in Georgetown or Chevy Chase – it was definitely a very narrow focus.

I was heavily into John D. MacDonald.

When I was a teenager, I thought if any of my friends or people at school see me reading a book, they’re gonna think I’m weak. So I didn’t even do it in private. Then I grew up, got into college, and the teachers turned me on to books, and I got hooked.

I never took a writing class.

I really feel like people who want to change things need to go out and change it themselves and not look to politicians to do that.

I’m forever grateful to have had the opportunity to prove myself to my dad. After I took over the diner, the look in my father’s eyes went from disappointment to respect.

Reading opens your mind and helps you understand and empathize with people who are unlike you and outside your breadth of experience.

My dad used to call me ‘the dreamer.’ He was right.

Can’t get my head around sci-fi or fantasy. I’m not putting those genres down; it’s just that I’m not built for them.

I was a movie freak before I was a book lover.

I always overtip. When I go to England, people think I’m stupid.

I’m a very sentimental, emotional person.

I’m proudly a crime writer, but it would be really inaccurate to call me a mystery writer.

I love writing books, but it’s a solitary experience. When I’m on a film set, I’m with a bunch of other artists working together to make one thing.

What we were all always saying with ‘The Wire’ was that there’s a whole group of people that America just sort of wants to throw away. They want to forget about them, and if they could, they’d get rid of them. They are Americans – they’re worth saving; they’re worth helping.

It would probably surprise people how prevalent reading is in institutions – and the degree to which some states discourage reading by instituting draconian rules and laws that try to limit and outright roadblock books in prisons.

When I was 19, my dad got sick, and I quit college to take over his business, a coffee shop on 19th Street, below Dupont Circle in D.C. I had been working there since I was 11 years old, so it was not a stretch to think that I could do it, but my record as a teenager, in many respects, was less than stellar.

I’m a strong believer in second chances.

Kids need a father around to make them whole. They need their mom.

I never went to a writing school, so ‘The Wire’ was my writing school.

The cliche is that Washington is a transient town of people who blow in and out every four years with the new administrations. But the reality is that people have lived in Washington for generations, and their lives are worth examining, I think.

I’ve just been very interested in the living side of Washington, rather than the federal side, since I was a kid.

It’s a tradition that a writer will try to plant his flag in a certain city and protect that. The way to get your rep is to find the essence of the city and get it down on paper.

My father was a Marine who fought in the Pacific in WW II. He was a very tough guy, but after the war, he lived his life in a quiet and reserved manner because he had nothing to prove. I know now that he internalized his war experience.

I don’t judge anyone of any stripe by what they read. Reading is always good for you. It’s a positive act.

There is nothing like the rumble of a dual-piped American car with something under the hood.

I collect and read as many books about music and film as I do fiction.

I was a child in the ’60s and a teenager in the ’70s, which was the golden age of film as far as I’m concerned, between American film and the Italian reinvention of genre film.

‘The Turnaround’ isn’t even really a crime novel. But you need conflict to make a novel, any kind of novel, and I don’t know any other way to do it than crime.

Every young man’s best purchase is his first car, which spells freedom. My first one was a ’70 Camaro, springtime gold-over-saddle, a 307 with Hi-jackers and chrome reverse mags.

I can’t relax. I don’t have any hobbies.

‘Random Rules’ kicks off ‘American Water,’ and from its opening line – ‘In 1984 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection’ – you know you’re in for something strange and special.

I even dream about writing. I’m talking seeing words across the page, whole paragraphs.

‘The Deuce’ came about when David Simon and I were put in contact with a guy who, along with his twin brother, owned a couple bars in Times Square.

Sometimes there’s a reason for the hype.

If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t have anyone’s words in my script but my own, but if you want complete autonomy, just stick to novels.

I shoot occasionally, but I’m no gun expert.

People want to see the world the way they want to see it, not the way it is.

For many years, I did ride-alongs with patrol cops, which is any citizen’s right.

Many fathers and sons never get to reconcile their differences or come to an understanding that fills the gap between love and expectations.

As far as I’m concerned, the voices of Washington, black Washington, it’s poetry, man. There’s beauty in it.

‘The Big Sky’ is an American classic.

I never went to school for writing, never took a writing class, but when you’re in a room with David Simon and Ed Burns and Dennis Lehane and Richard Price, and they’re going over something you’ve written, you learn what works and what doesn’t.

Every day I’m not working or writing is a wasted day to me.