Latest Don Winslow Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• With a 660-page book, you don't read every sentence aloud. I am terrified for the poor guy doing the audio book. But I do because I think we hear them aloud even if it's not an audio book. The other goofy thing I do is I examine the shape of the words but not the words themselves. Then I ask myself, "Does it look like what it is?" If it's a sequence where I want to grab the reader and not let the reader go then it needs to look dense. But at times I want the reader to focus on a certain word or a certain image and pause there.

  Don Winslow

  Book, Thinking, Focus

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Crime

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Don Winslow

  Smart, Thoughtful, Guy

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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

  Summer, Real, Swimming

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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

  Rap, Book, Kids

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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

  Hate, Book, Writing

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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

  Dope, House, Black

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• What happened with the opioid epidemic is the Mexican cartels made a very deliberate, corporate decision to undercut the price of opioids. What they discovered was they could increase production, increase potency and decrease the price, and sell it for a third of what the Big Pharma could, or street dealers could, for Big Pharma pills. North America, and to a slightly lesser extent Europe, is being flooded with this Mexican heroin as a direct result of the attempt to undercut American pharmaceutical companies.

  Don Winslow

  Mexican, Decision, Heroin

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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

  Don Winslow

  Sorry, People, Heroin

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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

  Grandmother, Hockey, My Grandmother

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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

  Jesus, Remember

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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

  Character, Eye, Giving

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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

  Giving Up, Thinking, People

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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

  Thinking, Trying, Attention

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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

  Husband, Home, Son

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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

  Gun, People, Police

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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

  Dirty, Men, Thinking

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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.

  Don Winslow

  Gun, Violence, Things Happen

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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

  Don Winslow

  Thinking, People, Mind

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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

  Mother, Real, Kids

  "Crime novelist of ‘The Cartel’ calls for end to war on drugs". "PBS NewsHour" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. July 16, 2015.

• 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

  Heart, Ambition, Character

  "Don Winslow on his amazing new book ‘The Cartel’ and America’s drug war". Interview with Drew Mcweeny, uproxx.com. July 01, 2015.

• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Average

  "Don Winslow on his amazing new book ‘The Cartel’ and America’s drug war". Interview with Drew Mcweeny, uproxx.com. July 01, 2015.

• 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

  Drunk, Population, Substance

  "A Don Winslow on his amazing new book ‘The Cartel’ and America’s drug war". Interview with Drew Mcweeny, uproxx.com. July 01, 2015.

• 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

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  "Don Winslow on his amazing new book ‘The Cartel’ and America’s drug war". Interview with Drew Mcweeny, uproxx.com. July 01, 2015.