Michael Connelly

“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.”

“The books I've written the fastest were the best reviewed and sold the best.”

“There is a means to every end. A root to any cause. Sometimes the root is more evil than any cause, though it's the cause that is usually most vilified.”

“I write puzzles and mysteries. Nothing too highfalutin.”

“When I am so intensely involved with writing my books, I don't like to reread them. I feel like that story is done.”

“When you're working on a novel, you never think about how much it would cost to shoot one of your scenes. But that's a huge consideration in film and TV.”

“In writing on the page, you can be a bit elliptical, but on TV, you can't dance around stuff. You either show it, or you don't.”

“Well, did he do it?"She always asked the irrelevant question. It didn't matter in terms of the strategy of the case whether the defendant "did it" or not. What mattered was the evidence against him -- the proof -- and if and how it could be neutralized. My job was to bury the proof, to color the proof a shade of gray. Gray was the color of reasonable doubt.”

“I'd seen Titus Welliver in a few shows and felt he had some inner demons in his portrayals, as does Harry Bosch.”

“The characters I write about are very internal.”

“I wanted to learn about the worlds I wanted to write about in fiction.”

“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.”

“When I went home at 20 to tell my parents, 'I don't want to be an engineer, I want to try and write books,' I was braced for, 'That's not gonna happen.' But I didn't get that response, and maybe it was because of my dad's experience of having an artistic dream and having to put it aside.”

“I get up to write while it's still dark, 5 or 5:30. I start by editing and rewriting everything I did the day before, and that gives some momentum for the day.”

“A movie is like a city. There's, like, 150 people working, and it's all because of something that came out of your head.”

“I'm always looking at ways of shaking up the writing experience because I think it helps.”

“You don’t like what you see out your window, you put up a wall.”

“I think the only boundaries are individual and personal. A writer should be free to write about anything he or she wants to, including the twin towers. I have made small references to 9/11 in my past two books.”

“I'd be lying if I said the success means nothing to me. It does. I enjoy it and live a pretty great life.”

“As soon as I got to L.A., there was this big crime where these guys tunnelled underneath a bank on a three-day weekend and went right up to the vault and emptied everything out.”