Quotes from Don Winslow

So I thought I should write five pages a day. And that's what I did. Eventually I had a book.

My earliest influence was Shakespeare - I read Shakespeare incessantly as a kid.

A great review is great. A bad review is the worst.

Police work in major cities - and New York is no exception - has always been vulnerable to corruption. Teddy Roosevelt built his career on it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

I would prefer things to be peaceful and not have conflict.

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.

I start work at 5 in the morning and I have a wicked insomnia problem.

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.

The boys quiet until Ben looks across the table at Chon, holds his thumb and index finger a millimeter apart, and says, "We're that close to being gay." They laugh for half an hour. Collective dicks

In his mind's eye, though, he sees— —Taliban moving like scorpions across a similar landscape his own caravan blown to shit blood streaming from buddies Now I'm one of them He sights in again. No time for Lack of PTSD He only hopes that Gentle Ben Increase-the-Peace Ben is one of them, too, now. Now, Ben. Find your inner Taliban.

Step by motherfucking step. Our ends know our beginnings but the reverse isn't true.

He became his own blues song, a Tom Waits loser, a Kerouac saint, a Springsteen hero under the lights of the American highway and the neon glow of the American strip. A fugitive, a sharecropper, a hobo, a cowboy who knows that he's running out of prairie but rides anyway because there's nothing left but to ride.

The 'Mexican drug problem' is not the Mexican drug problem. It is the American drug problem. We are the buyers, and without buyers, there can be no sellers.

And the most dangerous place on earth— Is where you're safe.

Uno empieza siendo idealista, moralmente fuerte, si se quiere, pero entonces la ropa de tu fuerza moral se va desgastando poco a poco hasta que ya no puedes más y haces cosas que nunca pensaste que harías, o no haces cosas que siempre pensaste que harías.

In the words of Oscar Wilde, 'I can resist everything but temptation.

Dope is supposed to be bad, but in a bad world it's good