Quotes from Michael Connelly

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.

You have to write about what scares you.

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.

There are nineteen Harry Bosch books, and someone told me if you add up the descriptions of Harry from all of them, it would come to less than three pages. He's very elliptically described over the two decades during which the novels occur. I did that by intention.

Every time I visit Brisbane, I think, 'This is my childhood.'

I trust the readers to build their own visual images. To me, that's part of the wonder of reading.

When I was a teenager, I was a voracious reader of crime fiction, but only contemporary books. I was not interested in reading 'The Glass Key' or 'The Maltese Falcon' - stuff that was 40 or 50 years old.

We're all seeking order. We're all seeking control.

I learned to write crime novels by reading people I hoped to emulate: people like James Lee Burke, Lawrence Block, Joseph Wambaugh, and Sue Grafton.

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

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

There is nothing you can do about the past except keep it there.

A really good day for me is to write my book for about four hours, go to the writing room for about four hours and then maybe come back to the book to finish the day for a few more hours of it.

Ingeniously plotted and executed, Print the Legend is an epic masterpiece from Craig McDonald. Beginning to end, I was riveted by this story of character, history and intrigue.

I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.

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

People like the Bosch books because they like Harry Bosch, not because the plots are fantastic.

I have a large collection of biographies about jazz musicians.

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.

A newspaper is the center of a community, it's one of the tent poles of the community, and that's not going to be replaced by Web sites and blogs.

As soon as I got to L.A., there was this big crime where these guys tunnelled underneath a bank on a three-day weekend and went right up to the vault and emptied everything out.

I went into journalism to learn the craft of writing and to get close to the world I wanted to write about - police and criminals, the criminal justice system.

The LAPD, like most police departments, is a male-dominated bureaucracy. A woman faces a lot of pushback.

When you're working on a novel, you never think about how much it would cost to shoot one of your scenes. But that's a huge consideration in film and TV.