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?
When you criminalize something, only criminals can deal with it. When criminals deal with it, there's no recourse to law, so there's only recourse to violence.
A great review is great. A bad review is the worst.
I think we need to rethink our ideas about what policing is and should be. I think we need to rethink our ideas about the criminal justice system as a whole, including the hysterically named corrections system. I mean, what's being corrected? Look, none of it's working.
I start work at 5 in the morning and I have a wicked insomnia problem.
We have contradictory expectations of police: We want to be perfectly safe and perfectly free. We want total security and total privacy. We want the bad guys stopped and the good guys unmolested. That's great for the consumer; try providing it.
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.
I have to remind the people who put down East Coast surfing that Kelly Slater is from Florida.
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.
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.
I would prefer things to be peaceful and not have conflict.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My problem is not that there are too few ideas out there. It's that there are too many.
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.
