Don Winslow

As a writer, when you fall in love with a place, you want to spend more time in it, either physically or mentally, and so you write about it. ”

My earliest influence was Shakespeare - I read Shakespeare incessantly as a kid. ”

Police departments are always a reflection of the society that they serve. Is there such a thing as 'police culture?' Absolutely. Is that culture isolated form the surrounding society? Absolutely not. ”

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. ”

It's funny because I think that genre literature can be looked down on by literature literature. And I like that! I like being scorned; I like people looking down their noses at us a little bit... It gives us a little chip on our shoulder. ”

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 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 lived in mafia neighborhoods off and on when I was a kid. If you were in Little Italy, in East Harlem, in Brooklyn... Those neighborhoods were, in those years, dominated by mafia families. You knew it and you felt it, you know? ”

I was very influenced by films and books like 'Serpico,' 'The French Connection,' and 'Prince of the City.' They were some of the reasons I became a crime writer. ”

There are various kinds of savagery: emotional, spiritual, economic, and cultural savagery. ”