Don Winslow

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“This violent state of mind.This violent state of mine.”

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

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

“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.”

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