Michael Connelly Quotes

Politicians could talk about building walls and changing laws to keep people out, but in the end they were just symbols. Neither would stop the tide any more than the rock jetties at the mouth of the port did. Nothing could stop the tide of hope and desire. Bosch

Money. The ultimate motivation. The ultimate way of keeping score.

thanks to the many police officers who over the years have given me an insight into their jobs and lives. I also want to ackowledge Tom Mangold

Sex murders were usually the work of psychopaths and with that psychology was an innate ability to lie, to act, to feign surprise and horror when it was needed. Psychopaths were great liars.

I've been able to write at least one book a year for 20 years, and I don't think I would've had that kind of drive if I hadn't come out of the journalism business.

more creepy charm than an evangelist.

One of the crazies moved into the cone of light beneath a streetlight. It was a black man, high-stepping and making jerking movements with his arms. He made a crisp turn and began moving back into the darkness. He was a trombone player in a matching band in a world somewhere else.

In a daydream sort of way, I think it would be pretty cool to direct a movie. But I have been on movie and TV sets and know it is hard work. I like directing it in my mind. It is easier.

All his life Bosch had lived and worked in society's institutions. But he hope he had escaped institutional thinking, that he made his own decisions.

Writing does for me what you got in that glass does for you. If I can write about it, I can understand it. And I can put it in the ground. That's all I want to do.

There is no client as scary as an innocent man.
J. Michael Haller, Criminal Defense Attorney, Los Angeles, 1962.

center. He said no. He said, in very fine English, 'I buy, I don't sell.' Then he escorted me out. But I think that was Tran. Something about him.

Every day you fight death with life and what is more vital in life than the physical act of love?

His eyes strayed past us to the television. On the program they were now selling a glove with small rubber bristles on the palm for grooming pets. "I know what else you could use that for," Adkins said. He made a masturbation motion with his hand and winked and smiled at Thompson. "That's what they're really selling that for, you know.

The character can never be static from book to book. People might think you just come up with a new plot and stick this guy in. Well, he has to be as new as the plot every time.

Bosch knew that department policy held that deadly force was justified if it was used to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to an officer or a citizen. Mendenhall was not required to identify herself or give Ellis the opportunity to drop his weapon.

No longer tell if he was upset by being so far

like a small room. Like a

Walls within walls, Bosch thought. He wondered what the owners did with all of their space besides fearfully guard it.

The coyote howled once more. Bosch thought he could hear a dog answering somewhere in the distance. "Are you like him?" she asked. "Who?" "Timido. Alone out there in the dark world." "Sometimes. Everybody is sometimes." "Yes,

Smith & Wesson 9mm - satin finished, stainless steel and loaded with eight rounds of XTPs.

The law was not about truth. It was about negotiation, amelioration, manipulation.

Civil unrest occurs when the feelings of overwhelming powerlessness hit critical mass.

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more."
("The Castle")

Somebody once called the media the merchants of chaos.

Eenie, meenie, minie, moe, catch a killer by the toe. If his lawyer's Haller, let him go. Eenie, meenie, minie, moe. Hey bro.

In the morning, Bosch sat on the rear deck of his house and watched the sun come up over the Cahuenga Pass. It burned away the morning fog and bathed the wildflowers on the hillside that had burned the winter before. He watched and smoked and drank coffee until the sound of traffic on the Hollywood Freeway became one uninterrupted hiss from the pass below.

I put my hand down below the table to check my zipper. You have to stand before a jury only once with your fly open and it will never happen again

There was polite laughter in the courtroom. Bosch noticed that the attorneys
prosecution and defense
dutifully joined in, a couple of them overdoing it. It had been his experience that while in open court a judge could not possibly tell a joke that the lawyers did not laugh at.

I've sold 11 of my books to Hollywood. There are all kinds of my books on shelves in Hollywood because the scripts didn't capture the characters.

that. You see, not all of the casinos have

I love movies. Movies have influenced me as a writer.

you can't explain crazy.

Was. "Uh, hi, Walter. This is my daughter, Hayley, and this is her mom, Maggie McPherson." "Hi," Hayley said shyly. Maggie nodded and looked uncomfortable. Walter made the mistake of thrusting his hand out to Maggie. If she could have

You can become unhinged and cut loose from the world. You can believe you are a permanent outsider. But the innocence of a child will bring you back and give you the shield of joy with which to protect yourself. I have learned this late in life but not too late. It's never too late.

there is a light that never goes out

I was enamored of detectives as a teenager. I liked what they did - piecing things together, thinking about situations. But to get there? Eight to ten years in a patrol car? I didn't have that in me. I didn't want to tell people what to do.

As a reporter, you develop an ear for dialogue because it's your job to capture it accurately.

She refused to accept the simple truism that the better you were, the bigger threat you were to those at the top ...

Little Peter's," Soto said.

Aronson was getting at the fine line between seeking the truth and seeking a verdict in your client's favor. They weren't always the same thing.

I wrote my first real murder story as a journalist for the Daytona Beach News Journal in 1980. It was about a body found in the woods. Later, the murder was linked to a serial killer who was later caught and executed for his crimes.

There is nothing you can do about the past except keep it there.

Non ... Gratum ... Anum ... Ro - ' I can't make that out." "Rodentum," Bosch said. Sakai looked at him. "Dog Latin," Bosch told him. "Not worth a rat's ass. He was a tunnel rat. Vietnam.

All these years in the straight life and she still had a whore's pride.

The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers' bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.

I really enjoy mysteries, well-written fiction novels, historical novels, and the occasional vampire, wolf, human triangle as long as it's real

You see, the past is what you make of it. You can use it to hurt yourself or others or you can use it to make yourself strong.

In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is equalized with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that's in the long run. We must live in the short run and matters are often unjust there. The compensating for us of the universe makes all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process.

Can't complain because nobody listens.

Fulgoni gave me a look that I interpreted as a warning that I was crossing into a territory that he had deemed off-limits when we had last discussed his testimony. I gave him a look back that said too fucking bad. I have you under oath. I own you.

The alley was like most any other alley in a city where the infrastructure was crumbling, in a state where the infrastructure was crumbling. It was a patchwork of asphalt spot repairs and loose gravel over a crumbling base of decades-old concrete.

Mr. Elliot will see you now.

And what's with all the names on the new list? I've got kids I'd like to spend time with tonight."
"Give it to Lankford. He has the time. I think he ate his kids.

You know what my father said about innocent clients? ... He said the scariest client a lawyer will ever have is an innocent client. Because if you fuck up and he goes to prison, it'll scar you for life ... He said there is no in-between with an innocent client. No negotiation, no plea bargain, no middle ground. There's only one verdict. You have to put an NG up on the scoreboard. There's no other verdict but not guilty."
Levin nodded thoughtfully.
"The bottom line was my old man was a damn good lawyer and he didn't like having innocent clients," I said. "I'm not sure I do, either.

Most criminal defendants talk their way into prison. Few talk their way out. The best single piece of advice I have ever given a client is to just keep your mouth shut. Talk to no one about your case, not even your own wife. You keep close counsel with yourself. You take the nickel and you live to fight another day.

Living in L.A. sometimes felt like you were riding shotgun with the devil to the apocalypse.

Everybody has a need for their past, Bosch thought. Sometimes it pulls harder on you than the future.

It's only a wonderful world if you can make it that way. There are no street signs pointing to Paradise Road.

All his life Harry Bosch believed he had a mission. And to carry out that mission he needed to be bulletproof. He needed to build himself and his life so that he was invulnerable, so that nothing and no one could ever get to him.

All of that changed on the day he was introduced to the daughter he didn't know he had. In that moment he knew he was both saved and lost. He would be forever connected to the world in the way only a father knew.

- "Nine Dragons" by Michael Connelly

He had lived alone most of his life. He was used to places that were empty. He knew the real shelter of a home was inside yourself.

I saw a sneak preview of Jack Reacher and give two thumbs up to Tom Cruise. He did a great job with the role.

Parents see their children not only as they are but as they hope they will be in the future. Happy, fulfilled, not afraid.

In now, whenever I think of something. She smiled and he smiled and they went back into

EVEN THOUGH I KNEW it was going to be what she would ask me, Graciela McCaleb's request gave me pause. Terry McCaleb had died on his boat a month earlier. I had read about it in the Las Vegas Sun. It had made the papers because of the movie. FBI agent gets heart transplant and then tracks down his donor's killer. It was a story that had Hollywood written all over it and Clint Eastwood played the part, even though he had a couple decades on Terry. The film was a modest success at best, but it still gave Terry the kind of notoriety that guaranteed an obituary notice in papers across the country. I had just gotten back to my apartment near the strip one morning and picked up the Sun. Terry's death was a short story in the back of the A section.

It had been Bosch's experience that when you looked back at a life, you used a magnifying glass. Everything was bigger, amplified.

It had been one of the biggest landgrabs in the city's history and Bosch knew the story well, having tried all his life to counter his love of baseball and the Dodgers with the ugly story buried beneath the diamond where, as a boy, he watched Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale pitch. It seemed to him that every gleaming success in the city had a dark seam to it somewhere, usually just out of view.

When I am so intensely involved with writing my books I don't like to reread them.

I'm going to have to go out there. She had a mother and a brother. See who's still around and can look at this thing."
"Harry, you sure you
"
"You think I have a choice?

I think there'd be huge losses if there weren't newspapers. I know everything's shifting to the Internet and some people would say, 'News is news, what you're talking about is a change of consumption, not the product that's out there.' But I think there is a change.

But before I left," Rider continued, "I learned enough to know that most often sexual abuse of children comes from inside the family, relatives or close friends. The boogey monsters who climb through the window and abduct are few and far between.

Oxnard was the biggest city in Ventura County. Its unattractive name was that of a sugar beet farmer who built a processing plant in the settlement in the late nineteenth century. The city totally surrounded Port Hueneme, where there was a small U.S. Navy base.

Had going on it.' Lindell laughed as though I had suggested something absurd.

The Chicago Way is a wonderful first novel. Michael Harvey has studied the masters and put his own unique touch on the crime novel. This book harkens the arrival of a major new voice.

If the system turns away from the abuses inflicted on the guilty, then who can be next but the innocents?

The gravel road widened into a large turnaround where three similar looking and designed brothels sat waiting for customers. They were called Sheila's Front Porch, Tawny's High Five Ranch and Miss Delilah's House of Holies.
"Nice," Rachel said as we surveyed the scene. "why are these places always named after women
as if women actually own them?"
"You got me. I guess Mister Dave's House of Holies wouldn't go over so well with the guys."
Rachel smiled.
"You're right. I guess it's a shrewd move. Name a place of female degradation and slavery after a female and it doesn't sound so bad, does it? It's packaging.

Hidden Highlands was maybe a little richer but not that different from many of the other small, wealthy and scared enclaves nestled in the hills and valleys around Los Angeles. Walls and gates, guardhouses and private security forces were the secret ingredients of the so-called melting pot of southern California.

How I work is that I write a story I'd like to read. Then you fly to Paris or Sydney and the interviewers talk about the greater significance of your work.

That's justice," she said, nodding at the statue. "She doesn't hear you. She doesn't see you. She can't feel you and won't speak to you. Justice, Detective Bosch, is just a concrete blonde.

Bosch always thought that if you started with the assumption that murder is an unreasonable action, then how could there ever be a fully

Getting the quote right isn't what matters. It's remembering what it means.

The good ones all had that hollow space inside. The empty place where the fire always burns. For something. Call it justice. Call it the need to know. Call it the need to believe that those who are evil will not remain hidden in darkness forever.

Action and adventure on land and sea-you can't ask for more. But Robert Kurson raises the ante in Pirate Hunters with an array of mystery and a fleet of colorful characters spanning four centuries. This is a great summer read!

As a bassist he could never really be a sideman. He was always the anchor. He drove the beat. even if it was behind Miles Davis'a horn.

A newspaper is the center of a community, it's one of the tent poles of the community, and that's not going to be replaced by Web sites and blogs.

I think I would spend the first 30 weeks not writing, just clearing my head and seeing parts of the world I haven't seen and going back to places I have seen and love.

What it meant." "That's fine." Bosch moved to the drawer and looked in. There were two thin manila files and two packs of envelopes with rubber bands holding them together. The first file he looked through contained Eno's birth certificate, passport, marriage license and other personal records. He put it back in the drawer. The next file contained LAPD forms and Bosch quickly recognized them as the pages and reports that had been removed from the Marjorie Lowe murder book. He knew he had no time to read them at the moment and put the file in the beer box with the other files. The rubber band on the first package of envelopes snapped when he tried to remove it and he was reminded of the band that had been around the blue binder that contained the case files. Everything about this case was old and ready to snap, he thought. The envelopes were all from a Wells Fargo Bank branch in Sherman Oaks and each one contained a statement for a savings account in the name of McCage

I would change very little because I have been very, very fortunate. A lot of things fell into place for me simply by happenstance. When that happens you don't really want to change anything, even if you could. Editorially my regrets are few and for the most part minor. I look back on my first published book and think I held on to it too long, babied it too long.

Play fair, Haller." "It's not a fair game. Did she tell you

I went into journalism to learn the craft of writing and to get close to the world I wanted to write about - police and criminals, the criminal justice system.

You're a sleazy defense lawyer with two ex-wifes and an eight-year-old daughter and we all love you.

traveled to the defendant's attorney and locked

I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.

Search warrants designate a specific window of time during which the search must take place. Afterward, police must in a timely manner file a document with the court called a search-warrant return that lists exactly what was seized. It is then the judge's responsibility to review the seizure to make sure that the police acted within the parameters of the warrant.

What is important is not what you hear said, it's what you observe.

It is in the instinctual interpretation of voice and personality that we form our judgments of others. Nothing beats that. Not fingerprints, not DNA, not the pointed finger of an eyewitness.

own trouble he was paying for. I handled his mother's foreclosure defense and got her

With the money from the legal settlement, he hires a beautiful young woman from the local university to type for him as he orally composes the sentences. But soon he realizes she is editing and rewriting what he tells her before she even types it in. And what dawns on him is that she is the better writer. Soon he sits mute in the room while she writes. He only watches. He wants to kill her, strangle her with his hands. But he can't move his hands to do it. He is in hell.

Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really droppped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically
any way you want to look at it
everbody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case.

There was still chicken on the bone but sometimes you just have to push the plate away.