Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was a safari guide in the 1980s in Kenya.
A great review is great. A bad review is the worst.
I think you can use fiction to get inside people's minds.
I would prefer things to be peaceful and not have conflict.
And the most dangerous place on earth - Is where you’re safe.
Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart.
I start work at 5 in the morning and I have a wicked insomnia problem.
My earliest influence was Shakespeare - I read Shakespeare incessantly as a kid.
A writer who doesn't need the money gains power and is dangerous in a negotiation.
There are various kinds of savagery: emotional, spiritual, economic, and cultural savagery.
So I thought I should write five pages a day. And that's what I did. Eventually I had a book.
I have to remind the people who put down East Coast surfing that Kelly Slater is from Florida.
If you let people believe that you are weak, sooner or later you’re going to have to kill them.
The novelist is the vestigial bone on the body cinema. We're like the little toe that can be cut off.
The Force deals a lot with the heroin epidemic, which I'm sorry to know people are experiencing in Canada.
By any objective standard, Joaquin Guzman Loera is an evil man who has caused untold suffering for others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've been writing since I was six years old. It's hard to imagine stopping. I would hate to think that I've already written my best book.
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.
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 always think of borders as something that separates two peoples but of course they unite them. It's something you have in common, literally.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 never think about a movie when I'm writing a book, because I think only two things could happen and both of them are bad. You write a lousy novel and a lousy film.
My grandmother was from Guelph, Ont. I grew up playing ice hockey, I'm a massive fan. A great-uncle who was in the early days of the NHL played for the Chicago Blackhawks.
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.
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.
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.
Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart. Never. Ever. 'You can come down the evolutionary ladder,' Chon has observed to Ben and O; 'you can't climb up.
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.
Ridley Scott obviously an iconic director, he's made some fantastic films. Obviously a very smart, very tasteful, thoughtful guy. So yeah, I'm in good shape; got Ridley Scott with The Cartel.
Bookstores never seem to know where to put me on the shelves. But I do. I love my genre and I love those writers, so I am happy to be considered a crime writer. That's what I consider myself.
How much more money do we have to waste, how many more families have to be destroyed, how many more people have to be killed before you summon the courage to tell the truth to the American people?
We need to do something about gun violence in America. But every time one of these things happen, we say the same thing, and then we don't seem to be able to do anything. And that needs to change.
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.
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.
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 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?
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?
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.
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.
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.