Joseph Wambaugh Quotes

The time has come for professional jurors.

Jury selection is strictly an emotional process. They're looking for people they can manipulate. Both sides are.

No, policemen were not danger lovers, they were seekers of the awesome, the incredible, even the unspeakable in human experience. Never mind whether they could interpret, never mind if it was potentially hazardous to the soul. To be there was the thing.

When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice.

Bill Bradfield gave Jack Holtz the stare, but Jack Holtz stared back and said, "That bullshit only works on intelligent people.

The serial arsonist is the most difficult to apprehend because the evidence is burned up.

The O.J. Simpson case, they had no understanding of that DNA evidence, and didn't want to.

When I interview people accused of capital offenses, I never even ask if they did it. I would consider that unprofessional.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

You've got people who are looking at DNA evidence and other evidence like that and they're ignoring it.

The Onion Field, that one got pretty close to me because I was a cop when it happened. I saw some of the indifference that my police department showed to the surviving officer.

When Vince was through talking that day, one of the grand jurors said, "Explain to me, to all of us, why in the world didn't you at some time go to Mrs. Reinert and warn her?" And by now Vince knew he'd spend the rest of his life being asked that question. And by now he knew that even when the words were not being uttered, the eyes were asking it.

I'm sure I took some licks at the system, and at trials and lawyers in general. I've seen enough of them for so many years both as a cop and a defendant in defamation cases.

I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again.

Flotsam said, "He thinks I shouldn't do surfboard self-defense on four squids that flip us off and stole my juices when I was rippin'. They thought it was cooleo till one of them caught my log upside his head when I snaked him on the next wave."

"What?" Ronnie said.

"All I said was," Jetsam said to Flotsam, "You should cap the little surf Nazi if you wanna turn him into part of the food chain, not torpedo him till he's almost dead in the foamy.

I hadn't done anything in six years; I was just vegetating.

Civil servants take forever to do anything.

What is it about the component of fire? People have written about it. People have wondered about it.

I mean that a battered child has a marvelous capacity to adjust to his torture and will ceaselessly love his battering parents. I mean that the mother of a sexually molested child will not leave nor truly protect the child from the father as long as the man has a good job or otherwise preserves that mother from an economic life which is more horrifying to her than the molestation of her child. I mean that the weakness of the human race is stupefying and that it's not the capacity for evil which astounds young policemen like you and me, Dean. Rather it's the mind boggling worthlessness of human beings. There's not enough dignity in mankind for evil and that's the most terrifying thing a policeman learns.

I enjoy adapting my own work, or anybody's work. I like to adapt books.

seemed constant, even as to old opinions. Shelly now held a master's degree from Notre

Nothing could be more fearful than losing one's freedom. To be confined. Never to see a golden cloudburst or rivers of sunlight on dark flowers. never to walk your own cultivated furrows. And the memory dangled over his heart like the sword of Damocles.

I certainly believe it's over for the jury system, but we won't admit it for a while.

Probably 95 percent of the things that are written never get on the screen.

I was never a wet-eyed, passionate writer; I was always a policeman.

The Onion Field made a real writer. And then I knew it was over, I couldn't be a cop anymore.

I write a thousand words a day. Nothing will stop me, I mean nothing, until the book is finished. I'm disciplined in spite of myself.

Every time I write a nonfiction book I get sued.