Don Winslow
A writer who doesn't need the money gains power and is dangerous in a negotiation.
A great review is great. A bad review is the worst.
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 novelist is the vestigial bone on the body cinema. We're like the little toe that can be cut off.
I was a safari guide in the 1980s in Kenya.
I have to remind the people who put down East Coast surfing that Kelly Slater is from Florida.
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.
You know, I mean this sincerely, you know, I'm so grateful that I get to get up in the morning and do this, you know, and write books.
My problem is not that there are too few ideas out there. It's that there are too many.
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.
So I thought I should write five pages a day. And that's what I did. Eventually I had a book.
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.
I've been around the surf culture since I was a kid. I grew up in a beach town in Rhode Island. Then eventually I lived in Dana Point, Calif., a real surf hotbed.
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.
Producing words isn't a problem for me. And I usually write two books at a time. When one horse gets winded, you jump on the other.
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 start work at 5 in the morning and I have a wicked insomnia problem.
There are various kinds of savagery: emotional, spiritual, economic, and cultural savagery.
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 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.
As someone who has researched and written about the Mexican cartels and the futile 'war on drugs' for coming on twenty years, I know how tough a subject it is. Mind-bending, soul-warping, heartbreaking, it challenges your intellect, your beliefs, your faith in humanity and God.
By any objective standard, Joaquin Guzman Loera is an evil man who has caused untold suffering for others.
Police work in major cities - and New York is no exception - has always been vulnerable to corruption. Teddy Roosevelt built his career on it.
Police departments are always a reflection of the society that they serve. Is there such a thing as 'police culture?' Absolutely. Is that culture isolated form the surrounding society? Absolutely not.
Don't kid yourself: The justice system is a business. It's about money.
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.
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?
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.
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.
As a writer, when you fall in love with a place, you want to spend more time in it, either physically or mentally, and so you write about it.
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.
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.
If Trump was really looking for Mexicans to pay for the wall, he should put in a call to Sinaloa. They'd probably build it for him.
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.
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.
I was very influenced by films and books like 'Serpico,' 'The French Connection,' and 'Prince of the City.' They were some of the reasons I became a crime writer.
My earliest influence was Shakespeare - I read Shakespeare incessantly as a kid.
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.
Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart.Collection: Smart
If you let people believe that you are weak, sooner or later you’re going to have to kill them.Collection: Believe
And the most dangerous place on earth - Is where you’re safe.Collection: Earth
I think you can use fiction to get inside people's minds.Collection: Thinking
I don't recognize myself. I don't know who I am anymore." And it's all fun and games until someone loses an I.Collection: Fun
Alcoholism, tobacco, drunk driving, these things will always be with us. There's always going to be a certain percentage of any population that is addicted to certain substances.Collection: Drunk
What happened with the opioid epidemic is the Mexican cartels made a very deliberate, corporate decision to undercut the price of opioids. What they discovered was they could increase production, increase potency and decrease the price, and sell it for a third of what the Big Pharma could, or street dealers could, for Big Pharma pills. North America, and to a slightly lesser extent Europe, is being flooded with this Mexican heroin as a direct result of the attempt to undercut American pharmaceutical companies.Collection: Mexican
I try to pay attention to language. I think that as a general rule, we as writers talk too much and we should listen more. I read my dialogue out loud to myself because I think that's when you catch the wrong notes and the wrong tones.Collection: Thinking
The devil's in the details. The way I view my job is to bring the reader into a world they otherwise could not enter and let them see it through the character's eyes. And you can only do that with detail. The details make the characters distinct from one another. If you can give them those little grace notes, those little touches, that's what makes the reader relate.Collection: Character
I have a life, I have a wife. I have an adult son who I'm very close to, and friends. I go hiking almost every day, four to six miles. In the summer, I'm out surfing or swimming. I think that real, human relationships with people mostly balance dark places in my work.Collection: Summer
I think one of the problems with being a fiction writer these days is that you can't keep up with the headlines. Things that people would say are absurd occur the next day or they come out of somebody's mouth. There are days I just wanna give up.Collection: Giving Up