Don Winslow Quotations

The bridge to Coronado Island off San Diego was built because the mob had a hotel there and needed a way to get people out there.

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

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

I have to remind the people who put down East Coast surfing that Kelly Slater is from Florida.

My problem is not that there are too few ideas out there. It's that there are too many.

I was trying in 'The Power of the Dog' to write a brutally accurate in-your-face, if you will, description of 30 years in the war on drugs. And the effect that that had on people.

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

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.

I would prefer things to be peaceful and not have conflict.

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.

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

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.

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.

In the first place, it's surreal to watch filming, to see the little ideas you had in your head and now Taylor Kitsch is doing it, or Salma Hayek. And then to see it loud and bright onscreen is a trip.

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

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

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.

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 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.

It's important to me that the reader goes on a ride with the characters, that you set context enough to know, "Okay, here's where we are in the world. Now we're just going to go inside this person's head, this guy's heart, this woman's ambitions and take it down to very, very small scale."

A lot of times, writers are told write as big as you can, and that's not untrue. But at times I think it's better to write as small as you can, to start scenes with little personal details or people who are doing average every day human things. That, to me, lets the average reader into that person's life. "Yeah I eat breakfast. I take a shower."

I never think about a movie when I'm writing a book, because I think only two things could happen and both of them are bad. You write a lousy novel and a lousy film.

If you let people believe that you are weak, sooner or later you’re going to have to kill them.

The Americans take a product that literally grows on trees and turn it into a valuable commodity. Without them, cocaine and marijuana would be like oranges, and instead of making billions smuggling it, I’d be making pennies doing stoop labor in some California field, picking it.

Alcoholism, tobacco, drunk driving, these things will always be with us. There's always going to be a certain percentage of any population that is addicted to certain substances.

Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart. Never. Ever. 'You can come down the evolutionary ladder,' Chon has observed to Ben and O; 'you can't climb up.

I don't recognize myself. I don't know who I am anymore." And it's all fun and games until someone loses an I.

I have sat with the mothers who have lost addicted sons. I have sat with families of kids who have been killed in drug-related gang violence. I have been to the prisons. I have seen the effects. At some point in time, I felt I had to do something other than write a novel about it, that I needed to try to make some sort of contribution, at least try to make some sort of difference in the real world.

How much more money do we have to waste, how many more families have to be destroyed, how many more people have to be killed before you summon the courage to tell the truth to the American people?

I think you can use fiction to get inside people's minds.

And the most dangerous place on earth— Is where you’re safe.

Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart.