Don Winslow Quotes

he's not sure how safe this meeting is going to be. And

Life, he muses, always gives you an excuse to take what you want anyway.

She's also ruthless - it's love me or off with your head. She's the Red Queen

Shit," Pablo says.

If you let people believe that you are weak, sooner or later you're going to have to kill them.

you do not avenge a murder by killing - you avenge it by living.

guy trips over the age thirty wire, he realizes that certain things he wanted in his life just aren't going to happen.

Adán fell asleep to these stories and slept like the dead until the sun struck him in the eyes and the whole long, wonderful summer day started again with the smell of fresh tortillas, manchaca, chorizo, and fat, sweet oranges.

The Mexicans have finally found a drug that white trash likes and can afford. And one thing you ain't never gonna run out of is white trash.

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.

Maybe, Keller thinks, I've become too used to solitude. Maybe I like it too much.

My problem is not that there are too few ideas out there. It's that there are too many.

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

Why do women love to talk about love?" Giorgio asks. "Why don't men, is more the question," Ana says.

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.

Hell isn't having no choice.
It's having to make a choice between horrific things.

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.

Maybe money can't buy happiness, but it can rent it for a long time.

Simon drove as if he knew something about physics that Einstein hadn't thought of and God never intended. If nature abhorred a vacuum, Simon positively loathed one, and rushed to fill in the tiniest gap in the heavy flow of speeding traffic. He passed on the right, left, center, and all variations in between, and the Keble responded as if involved in some kind of blood compact with its human master.

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 lost, the lonely, the bicultural misfits with a foot in two worlds and a place in neither.

What's the problem?" Fuck it, Art thought. Too late now. So he answered, "That we look at 'these people' like 'targets.

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.

We are all cripples, Keller thinks, limping together through this crippled world. It's what we owe to each other.

Mexico is a cemetery for secrets.

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.

What happened? Stan repeats.
To us?
To the country?
What happened when childhood ends in Dealey Plaza, in Memphis, in the kitchen of the Ambassador, your belief your hope your trust lying in a pool of blood again? Fifty-five thousand of your brothers dead in Vietnam, a million Vietnamese, photos of naked napalmed children running down a dirt road, Kent State, Soviet tanks roll into Prague so you turn on drop out you know you can't reinvent the country but maybe you reimagine yourself you believe you really believe that you can that you can create a world of your own and then you lower that expectation to just a piece of ground to make a stand on but then you learn that piece of ground costs money that you don't have.
What happened?
Altamont, Charlie Manson, Sharon Tate, Son of Sam, Mark Chapman we saw a dream turn into a nightmare we saw love and peace turn into endless war and violence our idealism into realism our realism into cynicism our cynicism into apathy our apathy into selfishness our selfishness into greed and then greed was good and we
Had babies, Ben, we had you and we had hopes but we also had fears we created nests that became bunkers we made our houses baby-safe and we bought car seats and organic apple juice and hired multilingual nannies and paid tuition to private schools out of love but also out of fear.
What happened?
You start by trying to create a new world and then you find yourself just wanting to add a b

Truth, justice and the American way. The American way is: truth and justice maybe say hello in the hallway, send each other a Christmas card, but that's about the extent of their relationship.

There is no water to put out the fire. Mi canto la esperanza. - Carlos Santana "Maria Maria

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.

Billions of dollars, trying unsuccessfully to keep drugs out of the world's most porous border? One-tenth of the anti-drug budget going into education and treatment, nine-tenths of those billions into interdiction? And not enough money from anywhere going into the root causes of the drug problem itself. And the billions spent keeping drug offenders locked up in prison, the cells now so crowded we have to give early release to murderers. Not to mention the fact that two-thirds of all the "non-drug" offenses in America are committed by people high on dope or alcohol. And our solutions are the same futile non-solutions - build more prisons, hire more police, spend more and more billions of dollars not curing the symptoms while we ignore the disease. Most people in my area who want to kick drugs can't afford to get into a treatment program unless they have blue-chip health insurance, which most of them don't. And there's a six-month-to-two-year waiting list to get a bed in a subsidized treatment program. We're spending almost $2 billion poisoning cocaine crops and kids over here, while there's no money at home to help someone who wants to get off drugs. It's insanity.

And morally, maybe, if there's such a thing as moral exhaustion. There is such a thing, he decides. You start by being idealistic, morally strong if you will, but then the rock of your moral strength is eroded, bit by bit, until you're, well, exhausted, and you do things that you never thought you would. Or you do things that you always feared you would. Or something like that. You'd think that there would be a breaking point - a decisive moment - but there is no single moment or event that you can put your finger on. No, it's not that dramatic - it's the dull, monotonous process of erosion. Maybe

He tells his guys, you change the oil in a Nissan, you just can't kill it. You'll die before that car will.

A lot of times, writers are told write as big as you can, and that's not untrue. But at times I think it's better to write as small as you can, to start scenes with little personal details or people who are doing average every day human things. That, to me, lets the average reader into that person's life. "Yeah I eat breakfast. I take a shower."

Beware the hospitality of the sociopath.

A lot of existential questions will be answered just after the "Fuck." As in life itself.

Grande is Mexico's harshest and most secure prison, and

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.

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.

…he started out with his eyes firmly on the guiding star, his feet planted on the path, but that's the thing about the life you walk - you start out pointed true North, but you vary one degree off, it doesn't matter for maybe one year, five years, but as the years stack up you're just walking farther and farther away from where you started out to go, you don't even know you're lost until you're so far from your original destination you can't even see it anymore

The old dictum is that "no plan survives first contact with the enemy," and the special-ops team is already regrouping and improvising a new plan. He hears the sharp, disciplined fire

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

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.

You can either love," Pablo says, "or you can talk about it. You can't do both.

His old priests might have told him there's sins of commission not omission. It's not always the things you do but the things you don't do that will cost you your soul. Sometimes it's not the spoken lie but the unspoken truth that opens the door to betrayal.

I'll look out for him," Keller said. Because he needs to. Call it penance, call it atonement or whatever the hell you want, he only knows that he needs to do it, that he can only find redemption by helping this boy find his, by showing love to what he hates, that at the end of the day or the end of the world, there are no separate souls. We will go to heaven or we will go to hell, but we will go together.

I have sat with the mothers who have lost addicted sons. I have sat with families of kids who have been killed in drug-related gang violence. I have been to the prisons. I have seen the effects. At some point in time, I felt I had to do something other than write a novel about it, that I needed to try to make some sort of contribution, at least try to make some sort of difference in the real world.

Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart.

Their only weapon is shame, if the powerful can even feel it.

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?

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.

Nasty Ass got his street name because he always smells like he has a round in the chamber. If

When the devil comes, he comes on angel's wings.

I'm sorry to pull you out of your classes, but your adviser understands," Kitteredge said. "He's a friend of the family."

So that's it, Neal thought. You bought me; you own me.

We go off the meds and elect Richard Nixon, the Nurse Ratched of the American political psych ward.

The people, they don't know what it takes sometimes to keep them safe and it's better that they don't.

We proclaimed the freedom of the individual, bought and drove millions of cars to prove it, built more roads for the cars to drive on so we could go the everywhere that was nowhere. We watered our lawns, we washed our cars, we gulped plastic bottles of water to stay hydrated in our dehydrated land, we put up water parks.
We built temples to our fantasies--film studios, amusement parks, crystal cathedrals, megachurches--and flocked to them.
We went to the beach, rode the waves, and poured our waste into the water we said we loved.
We reinvented ourselves every day, remade our culture, locked ourselves in gated communities, we ate healthy food, we gave up smoking, we lifted our faces while avoiding the sun, we had our skin peeled, our lines removed, our fat sucked away like our unwanted babies, we defied aging and death.
We made gods of wealth and health.
A religion of narcissism.
In the end, we worshipped only ourselves.
In the end, it wasn't enough.

At least Barrera didn't stick the envelope into her panties.

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

Your strengths are your weaknesses.

The more you try to protect something, the more vulnerable you make it.

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

Keller had a professor in college who said that civilization was a matter of plumbing. That basically, the infrastructure for moving clean water in and filthy water out is what allowed people to congregate in large populations in permanent dwellings and create cities and cultures. Otherwise, people had to be nomads to literally escape their own shit.

This is not a war on drugs. This is a war on the poor. This is a war on the poor and the powerless, the voiceless and the invisible,

They got the absolute freedom to choose what we want them to.

You just said that you decapitated the major cartels," one of the senators says.
"Exactly," Keller says. "And what was the result? An increase in drug exports into the United States. In modeling the war against terrorists, we've been following the wrong model. Terrorists are reluctant to take over the top spots of their dead comrades - but the profits from drug trafficking are so great that there is always someone willing to step up. So all we've really done is to create job vacancies worth killing for."
The other major strategy of interdiction - the effort to prevent drugs from coming across the border - also hasn't worked, he explains to them. The agency estimates that, at best, they seize about 15 percent of the illicit drugs coming across the border, even though, in their business plans, the cartels plan for a 30 percent loss.
"Why can't we do better than that?" a senator asks.
"Because your predecessors passed NAFTA," Keller says. "Three-quarters of the drugs come in on tractor-trailer trucks through legal crossings - San Diego, Laredo, El Paso - the busiest commercial crossings in the world. Thousands of trucks every day, and if we thoroughly searched every truck and car, we'd shut down commerce.

Satan can only tempt you with what you already have.

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.

Just across the bridge is the gigantic marketplace, the insatiable consumer machine that drives the violence here. North Americans smoke the dope, snort the coke, shoot the heroin, do the meth, and then have the nerve to point south (down, of course, on the map), and wag their fingers at the "Mexican drug problem" and Mexican corruption.

Luis hopes for heaven.
Keller fears hell.
Vera fears only death, and that because he takes such pleasure in life.

Perhaps loneliness - it is that loneliest time of the night, the predawn darkness when the worst dreams come, the sunrise seems far off, and the creatures that inhabit both the real world and the darker edges of the unconscious prowl with the impunity of predators who know that their prey is helpless and alone.

He feels
ennui
depression
adrift in his life. Purposeless, perhaps because
- dig a well in the Sudan and thejanjaweed come in and shoot the people anyway
- buy mosquito nets and the boys
you save grow up to
- rape women
- set up cottage industries in Myanmar and the army
- steals them and uses the women as slaves and
Ben is starting to be afraid that he is starting to share Chon's opinion of the human species
that people are basically
shit.

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.

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

Perhaps we're not the greater good, but we are the lesser of evils.

Everyone thought the mob was done after RICO.... And they were. Then the Towers came down. Overnight, the feds shifted three-quarters of their personnel into anti-terrorism and the mob made a comeback. Shit, they even made a fortune overcharging for debris removal from Ground Zero.... 9/11 saved the mafia.

The bozo who's going to go early John Woo all over the manicured lawns and flower beds just to show he doesn't give a fuck about convention.

Together, Ben and Chon make up a collective pacifist. Ben is the paci Chon is the fist.