Don Winslow Quotes

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.

- Don Winslow

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

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

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

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

I have to remind the people who put down East Coast surfing that Kelly Slater is from Florida.

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

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?

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

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

- Don Winslow

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

- Don Winslow

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

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

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 Winslow

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

- Don Winslow

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

- Don Winslow

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

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

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?

- Don Winslow

By any objective standard, Joaquin Guzman Loera is an evil man who has caused untold suffering for others.

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

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

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow

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

- Don Winslow

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.

- Don Winslow