34+ Don Winslow Quotes On Power, Crime And Border

Don Winslow is an American author of crime fiction and non-fiction books. He is best known for his series of novels featuring detective Neal Carey and his epic novel, The Power of the Dog. Winslow is also the author of the bestselling novel The Cartel and its sequel The Border. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Don Winslow on power, life, crime.

Top 10 Don Winslow Quotes

1. Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart.
2. If you let people believe that you are weak, sooner or later you’re going to have to kill them.
3. And the most dangerous place on earth - Is where you’re safe.
4. 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.
5. I start work at 5 in the morning and I have a wicked insomnia problem.
6. Ridley Scott obviously an iconic director, he's made some fantastic films. Obviously a very smart, very tasteful, thoughtful guy. So yeah, I'm in good shape; got Ridley Scott with The Cartel.
7. I have to remind the people who put down East Coast surfing that Kelly Slater is from Florida.
8. We need to do something about gun violence in America. But every time one of these things happen, we say the same thing, and then we don't seem to be able to do anything. And that needs to change.
9. 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.
10. I would prefer things to be peaceful and not have conflict.

Don Winslow Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

I have a life, I have a wife. I have an adult son who I'm very close to, and friends. I go hiking almost every day, four to six miles. In the summer, I'm out surfing or swimming. I think that real, human relationships with people mostly balance dark places in my work. — Don Winslow

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

Bookstores never seem to know where to put me on the shelves. But I do. I love my genre and I love those writers, so I am happy to be considered a crime writer. That's what I consider myself. — Don Winslow

You watch Jeff Sessions testifying in front of Congress, Jesus, like watching an amnesiac: "I don't recall," "I don't remember," "I don't recall," "I don't remember," "I don't remember what I don't recall," "I recall what I don't remember." Amazing. — Don Winslow

My grandmother was from Guelph, Ont. I grew up playing ice hockey, I'm a massive fan. A great-uncle who was in the early days of the NHL played for the Chicago Blackhawks. — Don Winslow

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

I'm a jazz guy and a Bruce Springsteen guy. So I wanted something more current, and edgier, and angrier. So I asked my kid to educate me about hip hop; he has an encyclopedic knowledge of it. And he did so. I found it to be much richer than I would've thought. I think some of the poetry in it is really spectacular. I threw rap into the book. I think I mentioned Kendrick Lamar. I'm really into Tupac these days. I love Nas, N.W.A. — Don Winslow

I've been writing since I was six years old. It's hard to imagine stopping. I would hate to think that I've already written my best book. — Don Winslow

Shane Salerno and I adapted my book Savages together, and I learned a lot about adaptation. I think it's an extremely difficult thing to do; adaptation might even be more difficult than writing an original screenplay. It's so much a matter of choices, making choices of what to leave in. It was an education. — Don Winslow

The Force deals a lot with the heroin epidemic, which I'm sorry to know people are experiencing in Canada. — Don Winslow

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. — Don Winslow

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

I think people will be surprised at some of the things about the shootings by policemen of unarmed African-American men. But I also think it's a balanced view. Balance has become almost a dirty word these days. It seems we're supposed to pick one side or the other. But these issues are extremely complicated. I think people will be surprised at some of that. — Don Winslow

That sounds like Anthony Soprano. He has a point. I've said it before: if you're black and you sell dope, you end up in the big house; if you're white and you sell a large amount of dope, you end up visiting the White House. So it's a matter of race and it's a matter of scale, frankly. — Don Winslow

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." — Don Winslow

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. — Don Winslow

American cops didn't create that atmosphere, they're the ones though who have to live with it on a daily basis. These are generalisations; you can't make generalisations about hundreds of thousands of people. The New York Police Department, for instance, has 38,000 police officers in it. But most cops, when I talk to them, desperately care about the victims of gun violence. They see it, they experience it. — Don Winslow

I try to pay attention to language. I think that as a general rule, we as writers talk too much and we should listen more. I read my dialogue out loud to myself because I think that's when you catch the wrong notes and the wrong tones. — Don Winslow

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

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

American cops are the ones who are in the emergency rooms. They're the ones who go to the morgues. They're the ones who have to go tell the families that their son is not coming back, their husband, their wife, is not coming home that night. So when we talk about guns and gun violence and police, let's understand that as well. No one wants guns off the streets more than cops because cops are killed by those guns. — Don Winslow

The devil's in the details. The way I view my job is to bring the reader into a world they otherwise could not enter and let them see it through the character's eyes. And you can only do that with detail. The details make the characters distinct from one another. If you can give them those little grace notes, those little touches, that's what makes the reader relate. — Don Winslow

I think one of the problems with being a fiction writer these days is that you can't keep up with the headlines. Things that people would say are absurd occur the next day or they come out of somebody's mouth. There are days I just wanna give up. — Don Winslow

Life Lessons by Don Winslow

1. Don Winslow's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the complexities of the criminal justice system and the need to fight for justice and fairness.
2. His work also highlights the power of storytelling to bring awareness to social issues and to create meaningful change.
3. Finally, Don Winslow's work demonstrates the value of empathy and compassion in tackling difficult and often controversial topics.