Don Winslow Quotes

#1. I respond to authenticity and originality, and I've been a fan of Don Winslow's ever since 'The Power Of The Dog.'

Chuck Hogan

#2. The dedication of Don Winslow's novel 'The Cartel' is nearly two pages long: a list of journalists who were either murdered or 'disappeared' in Mexico between 2004 and 2012 - the period covered in this hugely hypnotic new thriller.

Alan Cheuse

#3. That's all right, Neal thought. Every one of us is at least two people.

Don Winslow

#4. Annabel stared at the door, then turned to Sebastian, feeling quite dazed. "I think my grandmother may have just given me permission to ruin myself."
"I'll do all the ruining tonight," he said with a grin. "If you don't mind.

Julia Quinn

#5. The boys quiet until Ben looks across the table at Chon, holds his thumb and index finger a millimeter apart, and says, "We're that close to being gay."
They laugh for half an hour.
Collective dicks

Don Winslow

#6. The old dictum is that "no plan survives first contact with the enemy," and the special-ops team is already regrouping and improvising a new plan. He hears the sharp, disciplined fire

Don Winslow

#7. We are all cripples, Keller thinks, limping together through this crippled world. It's what we owe to each other.

Don Winslow

#8. They got the absolute freedom to choose what we want them to.

Don Winslow

#9. Art can't decide whether the War on Drugs is an obscene absurdity or an absurd obscenity. In either case, it's a tragic, bloody farce.

Don Winslow

#10. As for corruption, who's more corrupt - the seller or the buyer? And how corrupt does a society have to be when its citizens need to get high to escape their reality, at the cost of bloodshed and suffering of their neighbors?

Don Winslow

#11. This violent state of mind.
This violent state of mine.

Don Winslow

#12. The suits love their numbers, Malone thinks. This new management breed of cops are like the sabermetrics baseball people. They believe the numbers say it all, and when the numbers don't say what they want them to, they massage them like Koreans on Eighth Avenue until they get a happy ending.

Don Winslow

#13. All this and the wine's coming in and out, and by the time the waiters set the espressos down Callan's about half in the bag. He watches Calabrese take a long sip from an espresso cup. Then the boss says, "Tell me why I shouldn't kill you."
One motherfuck of an essay question.

Don Winslow

#14. 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.

Don Winslow

#15. When you ask people, "What's America's longest war?" they usually answer "Vietnam" or amend that to "Afghanistan," but it's neither. America's longest war is the war on drugs.

Don Winslow

#16. 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.

Don Winslow

#17. What's the problem?" Fuck it, Art thought. Too late now. So he answered, "That we look at 'these people' like 'targets.

Don Winslow

#18. They say that love conquers all. They're wrong, Keller thinks. Hate conquers all. It even conquers hate.

Don Winslow

#19. Maybe money can't buy happiness, but it can rent it for a long time.

Don Winslow

#20. You're a big boy," Ana observes, staring blankly into her cup. "You could have said no." "I stand with Oscar Wilde on the subject of temptation.

Don Winslow

#21. Why do women love to talk about love?" Giorgio asks. "Why don't men, is more the question," Ana says.

Don Winslow

#22. 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.

Don Winslow

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

Don Winslow

#24. ...'would have' is just another way of saying 'didn't.

Don Winslow

#25. Hell isn't having no choice.
It's having to make a choice between horrific things.

Don Winslow

#26. 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.

Don Winslow

#27. 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."

Don Winslow

#28. Even a North American defense lawyer is right sometimes," Aguilar says. "Like a broken clock, twice a day.

Don Winslow

#29. At least Barrera didn't stick the envelope into her panties.

Don Winslow

#30. the old "4-4-40" rough standard for human survival: four minutes without air, four days without water, forty days without food.

Don Winslow

#31. If you don't want to see me again, say so. But it's not right to say nothing. It's not right to go silent. You know what to do.

Emily Winslow

#32. Mexico is a cemetery for secrets.

Don Winslow

#33. You don't let them knock you out, you make them knock you out. You make them break their fucking hands knocking you out, you let them know that they've been in a fight, you give them something to remember you by every time they look in a mirror.

Don Winslow

#34. Satan can only tempt you with what you already have.

Don Winslow

#35. Their only weapon is shame, if the powerful can even feel it.

Don Winslow

#36. 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.

Don Winslow

#37. Nasty Ass got his street name because he always smells like he has a round in the chamber. If

Don Winslow

#38. 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.

Don Winslow

#39. 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.

Don Winslow

#40. The past isn't in the past. It's always with us. In our history. Our minds, our blood.

Don Winslow

#41. Maybe, Keller thinks, I've become too used to solitude. Maybe I like it too much.

Don Winslow

#42. You can either love," Pablo says, "or you can talk about it. You can't do both.

Don Winslow

#43. 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.

Don Winslow

#44. A lot of existential questions will be answered just after the "Fuck." As in life itself.

Don Winslow

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

Don Winslow

#46. Shit," Pablo says.

Don Winslow

#47. She's also ruthless - it's love me or off with your head. She's the Red Queen

Don Winslow

#48. I'm sorry to pull you out of your classes, but your adviser understands," Kitteredge said. "He's a friend of the family."

So that's it, Neal thought. You bought me; you own me.

Don Winslow

#49. 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.

Don Winslow

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

Don Winslow

#51. 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.

Don Winslow

#52. I'm not -
Lady Macbeth
Lucrezia Borgia
Catherine the Great. I am
- a woman doing what she has to do. I am
- the woman you made me.
Elena is at war.

Don Winslow

#53. Together, Ben and Chon make up a collective pacifist. Ben is the paci Chon is the fist.

Don Winslow

#54. Mateo runs up and Pablo hugs him. It's amazing, he thinks, that he never gets tired of that sensation.

Don Winslow

#55. When the devil comes, he comes on angel's wings.

Don Winslow

#56. The bozo who's going to go early John Woo all over the manicured lawns and flower beds just to show he doesn't give a fuck about convention.

Don Winslow

#57. Luis hopes for heaven.
Keller fears hell.
Vera fears only death, and that because he takes such pleasure in life.

Don Winslow

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

Don Winslow

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

Don Winslow

#60. Deliver my soul from the sword; my love from the power of the dog. Psalms 22:20

Don Winslow

#61. you do not avenge a murder by killing - you avenge it by living.

Don Winslow

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

Don Winslow

#63. Also: do not fuck with someone until you know exactly who the fuck you're fucking with.
And then don't do it.

Don Winslow

#64. Your strengths are your weaknesses.

The more you try to protect something, the more vulnerable you make it.

Don Winslow

#65. Truth, justice and the American way. The American way is: truth and justice maybe say hello in the hallway, send each other a Christmas card, but that's about the extent of their relationship.

Don Winslow

#66. This is not a war on drugs. This is a war on the poor. This is a war on the poor and the powerless, the voiceless and the invisible,

Don Winslow

#67. You need the money, the cash flow, but it's more than that, admit it. You love the game. The thrill, the taking off the bad guys, even the danger, the idea that you might get caught.

Don Winslow

#68. prefer married women and expensive whores. You have a nice meal, a few laughs, a good fuck, and then you each go back to your own lives. It's better that way." So

Don Winslow

#69. The people, they don't know what it takes sometimes to keep them safe and it's better that they don't.

Don Winslow

#70. 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.

Don Winslow

#71. The lost, the lonely, the bicultural misfits with a foot in two worlds and a place in neither.

Don Winslow

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

Don Winslow

#73. There is no water to put out the fire. Mi canto la esperanza. - Carlos Santana "Maria Maria

Don Winslow

#74. Giorgio cannot leave a bottle undrunk or an attractive woman unfucked, and those activities tend to get in the way of revolution.

Don Winslow

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

Don Winslow

#76. The Mexicans have finally found a drug that white trash likes and can afford. And one thing you ain't never gonna run out of is white trash.

Don Winslow

#77. he's not sure how safe this meeting is going to be. And

Don Winslow

#78. And the most dangerous place on earth - Is where you're safe.

Don Winslow

#79. Beware the hospitality of the sociopath.

Don Winslow

#80. 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.

Don Winslow

#81. Grande is Mexico's harshest and most secure prison, and

Don Winslow

#82. Now he seeks truth in silence. He seeks God in the same, although he has come to believe that truth and God are the same. Truth, stillness, and God.

Don Winslow

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

Don Winslow

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

Don Winslow

#85. We go off the meds and elect Richard Nixon, the Nurse Ratched of the American political psych ward.

Don Winslow

#86. Americans take their strength in victories, Mexicans' strength is in their ability to suffer loss.

Don Winslow

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

Don Winslow

#88. Perhaps we're not the greater good, but we are the lesser of evils.

Don Winslow

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

Don Winslow

#90. 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.

Don Winslow

#91. Keller has long believed that you have to be lucky to be good, but not good to be lucky.

Don Winslow

#92. guy trips over the age thirty wire, he realizes that certain things he wanted in his life just aren't going to happen.

Don Winslow

#93. 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.

Don Winslow

#94. Life, he muses, always gives you an excuse to take what you want anyway.

Don Winslow

#95. 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?

Don Winslow