Michael Connelly Quotes

I admit my reading time is limited because I can write in the situations and places where people usually read. But reading is the fuel – it’s inspiring – so I try to keep the tank full. What happens most of the time is I binge read. I will put aside a day or two to do nothing but read.

The books I’ve written the fastest were the best reviewed and sold the best.

I think it’s pretty apparent who my favorites are because I keep coming back to them. At the top of that list would be Harry Bosch, who’s now going on 20 years of literary life. I still like him the best because there’s still a lot to say about him.

To get a connection to your characters, you have to put them in a situation that you can feel yourself.

The act of reading a story is sacred, and people build images and all that stuff.

I could not have been happier with ‘The Lincoln Lawyer.’ They got the essence, and the casting, starting with McConaughey, was just perfect.

I want to tell stories that reflect how people are feeling.

I went into journalism to learn the craft of writing and to get close to the world I wanted to write about – police and criminals, the criminal justice system.

You have to write about what scares you.

It’s about being fair. It’s about Black Lives Matter. Yes, they matter. Everybody counts or nobody counts, and I think if more cops had the philosophy of Harry Bosch, we’d have less of these situations happening.

This next to never happens, but if I had time to sit on a beach and read, I wouldn’t read a cozy. But I’ve read cozies. That’s how I got interested in crime fiction: because my mother was a soft-boiled reader.

I wrote my first real murder story as a journalist for the Daytona Beach News Journal in 1980. It was about a body found in the woods. Later, the murder was linked to a serial killer who was later caught and executed for his crimes.

Many writers learned their craft and work ethic at a newspaper. I benefited from that.

When I lived in L.A. full time, I moved often – fourteen different neighbourhoods in sixteen years.

I first discovered Tampa in my 20s when I met my wife, who was living there, and I instantly fell in love with the city. It’s somewhere between a big city and small town, so you get the feeling of both.

What brought me to the table was Raymond Chandler and, to a lesser degree, Ross Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett. I was basically inspired to want to write like the classic private-eye writers.

I want people to think I’m a creative genius.

There are nineteen Harry Bosch books, and someone told me if you add up the descriptions of Harry from all of them, it would come to less than three pages. He’s very elliptically described over the two decades during which the novels occur. I did that by intention.

As far as characters in fiction that I really admire – it’s pretty strong to say you would wish that you had created another character – but I’ll throw out Will Graham, the protagonist in ‘Red Dragon,’ a book I’ve read several times.

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.

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.

I realize now I could have gotten a whole book out of that and so I think that was a big mistake. But the truth is you write in the moment and with your head down and there is no way back then that I could have conceived of Harry having the longevity that he has had.

I have a large collection of biographies about jazz musicians.

I think I would spend the first 30 weeks not writing, just clearing my head and seeing parts of the world I haven’t seen and going back to places I have seen and love.

I watched ‘Kojak’ religiously with my father. It was a great bonding time. He loved shows where the stakes were high. Life and death, justice prevailing, things like that. I think that helped set me on the path to what I do now.

As a former reporter, I wrote ‘The Scarecrow’ quickly – I didn’t have to think about what the character would do the way I do with Harry Bosch.

I got lucky, and the first book, ‘The Black Echo,’ got published.

The characters I write about are very internal.

I have high hopes for Renee Ballard’s literary life, and it can’t start out better than the top of ‘USA TODAY”s best-seller list.

I think the best way to sell a made-up character is to plant his feet into the real earth.

In 1995, I sold the rights to Harry Bosch to Paramount. They had several screenplays written, but a movie never happened. Harry Bosch went on the shelf, and I had to wait 15 years to get him back.

I like stories about people who have to go into darkness for a good reason and then have to figure out how to deal with the darkness that seeps into their souls.

A good day to me is writing from 6 A.M. ’til noon with a break to take my daughter to school. After lunch, if I still feel the momentum, I’ll hit it again.

What is overriding that and most important is that readers generally are interested in a good character. They might be more comfortable with Harry because they think they know him, but they always seem willing to give somebody new a chance.

I write my books never thinking of an actor.

Write every day even if it is just a paragraph.

I’m not Mr. Hollywood. I’m a book writer.

I never miss L.A. because I’m there enough.

I’ve crossed the Mexican border and gone to Tijuana a few times over the years, but I’ve never felt comfortable there.

The three books I’ve written in Florida about L.A. are my best takes on the physicality of the city, as far as description goes.

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

We want our government to protect us, to make sure something like 9/11 never happens again. We quickly moved to give law enforcement more power to do this. But that now begs the question, did we move to fast? Did we give too much power away? I don’t have the answer.

I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.

Every time I visit Brisbane, I think, ‘This is my childhood.’

I hate people thinking their city is unique, but there is a certain aura about Los Angeles; it’s not necessarily a beautiful thing, but it’s part of Harry Bosch.

My father was a builder. During my high school years, I worked for him. One summer, I was working with a guy who had just come back from Vietnam and had been a tunnel rat. He wouldn’t talk about the experience, but it sounded really scary to me.

That’s what I like most about writing fiction over journalism: the easy metaphors!

I feel I’m functioning at some level as a journalist because even though I write fiction, I’m trying to get the world accurate.

I don’t think anyone will believe me, but I’ve never been pressured by a publisher to churn out a book.

I love movies. Movies have influenced me as a writer.

I trust the readers to build their own visual images. To me, that’s part of the wonder of reading.

I’m a disciple of Raymond Chandler, who said in his essays that there’s a quality of redemption in anything that can be called art.

In the TV world, we are seeing a lot more power going to the writer. I sense it is a writer’s medium.

Artists are supposed to stay hungry.

I not only read Raymond Chandler but read all the crime fiction classics. I was hooked.

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.

When I write about places in L.A. – like where the best taco truck is or something – it’s not about L.A. To me, it’s about Harry Bosch, because he’s the guy that does these things and has this experience.

Now I’m writing about contemporary Los Angeles from memory. My process was to hang out, observe, research what I was writing about, and almost immediately go back to my office and write those sections. So it was a very close transfer between observation and writing.

L.A. is a long shot city, and those who make that shot – you can tell. You can see very clearly who’s made it and who hasn’t.

One of the great things about fiction is you can use an issue and describe it in human terms.

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 used to tape over the top corner of my computer screen so I couldn’t see what time it was. I like the idea that I’m just with the words and not knowing what’s going on with the world, when it’s lunch or dinner.

I learned to write crime novels by reading people I hoped to emulate: people like James Lee Burke, Lawrence Block, Joseph Wambaugh, and Sue Grafton.

People like the Bosch books because they like Harry Bosch, not because the plots are fantastic.

My grandparents were all born in the U.S., but their parents came from Ireland.

We’re all seeking order. We’re all seeking control.

Being a journalist always makes you a quick study of wherever you’re at. You’re out all the time and seeing places that normally you wouldn’t get to see. It gives you an unusual level of insight into any place.

The fulfillment I get from a good day of writing is addictive and will always bring me back the next day.

In a daydream sort of way, I think it would be pretty cool to direct a movie. But I have been on movie and TV sets and know it is hard work. I like directing it in my mind. It is easier.

That’s the irony in the work: the best stories are the worst things that happen. My best times were somebody else’s worst.