Quotes from Don Winslow

Art can't decide whether the War on Drugs is an obscene absurdity or an absurd obscenity. In either case, it's a tragic, bloody farce.

Deliver my soul from the sword. My love from the power of the dog.

Life's like a fat orange, Frank thinks. When you're young, you squeeze it hard and fast, trying to get all the juice in a hurry. When you're older, you squeeze it slowly, savoring every drop. Because, one, you don't know how many drops you have left, and, two, the last drops are the sweetest.

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.

There are various kinds of savagery: emotional, spiritual, economic, and cultural savagery.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The novelist is the vestigial bone on the body cinema. We're like the little toe that can be cut off.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

I was a safari guide in the 1980s in Kenya.

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.

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.

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.

A writer who doesn't need the money gains power and is dangerous in a negotiation.

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?

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.