Michael Connelly Quotes
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The characters I write about are very internal.
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You know you're going to get burned from time to time. It's just part of the game. So when it happens you have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and forget about it because they're about to snap the ball again.
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Can't complain because nobody listens.
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What is important is not what you hear said, it's what you observe.
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The best crime novels are not about how a detective works on a case; they are about how a case works on a detective.
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I'm always looking at ways of shaking up the writing experience because I think it helps.
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I love movies. Movies have influenced me as a writer.
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There were a billion lights out there on the horizon and I knew that all of them put together weren't enough to light the darkness in the hearts of some men.
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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.
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There is nothing you can do about the past except keep it there.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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She refused to accept the simple truism that the better you were, the bigger threat you were to those at the top.
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Any writer would rather dig into character than dig into fancy plots.
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There is no client as scary as an innocent man.
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Maybe it has something to do with being a reporter for a long time that I don't look to newspapers and television and so forth for inspiration most of the time.
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That's the irony in the work: the best stories are the worst things that happen. My best times were somebody else's worst.
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You can fall in love and make love many times but there is only one bullet with your name etched on the side. And if you are lucky enough to be shot with that bullet then the wound never heals.
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There is nothing like the start of a season, before all the one-run losses, pitching breakdowns and missed opportunities. Before reality sets in.
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I think there's a general misconception that anything written quickly lacks quality, and I don't believe that.
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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.
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Now I'm writing about contemporary Los Angeles from memory. My process was to hang out, observe, research what I was writing about, and almost immediately go back to my office and write those sections. So it was a very close transfer between observation and writing.
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I view people two ways. They're either eye-for-an-eye people or they are turn-the-cheek people.
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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.
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I've learned over the years that sometimes if you ask the same question more than once you get different responses.
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The writing ethic was influenced - when you have to write every day, there's no such thing as writer's block.
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When I am so intensely involved with writing my books I don't like to reread them.
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Don't go growing a conscience on me," I said. "I've been down that road. It doesn't lead you to anything good.
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We're all seeking order. We're all seeking control.
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