Don Winslow Quotes & Sayings

Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart. — Don Winslow

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

He feels
ennui
depression
adrift in his life. Purposeless, perhaps because
- dig a well in the Sudan and thejanjaweed come in and shoot the people anyway
- buy mosquito nets and the boys
you save grow up to
- rape women
- set up cottage industries in Myanmar and the army
- steals them and uses the women as slaves and
Ben is starting to be afraid that he is starting to share Chon's opinion of the human species
that people are basically
shit. — Don Winslow

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

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

Simon drove as if he knew something about physics that Einstein hadn't thought of and God never intended. If nature abhorred a vacuum, Simon positively loathed one, and rushed to fill in the tiniest gap in the heavy flow of speeding traffic. He passed on the right, left, center, and all variations in between, and the Keble responded as if involved in some kind of blood compact with its human master. — Don Winslow

Victoria was always nagging him to eat better, drink less, and go to the gym, but then again, Pablo has long felt that she (barely) sublimates her innate fascism with exercise and diet regimens and has recently taken to attending weekly "boot camp" sessions where she probably achieves orgasms as some steroid-enraged instructor screams at her. Ana — Don Winslow

And morally, maybe, if there's such a thing as moral exhaustion. There is such a thing, he decides. You start by being idealistic, morally strong if you will, but then the rock of your moral strength is eroded, bit by bit, until you're, well, exhausted, and you do things that you never thought you would. Or you do things that you always feared you would. Or something like that. You'd think that there would be a breaking point - a decisive moment - but there is no single moment or event that you can put your finger on. No, it's not that dramatic - it's the dull, monotonous process of erosion. Maybe — Don Winslow

Deliver my soul from the sword; my love from the power of the dog. Psalms 22:20 — Don Winslow

At least Barrera didn't stick the envelope into her panties. — Don Winslow

That's all right, Neal thought. Every one of us is at least two people. — Don Winslow

They got the absolute freedom to choose what we want them to. — Don Winslow

Everyone thought the mob was done after RICO.... And they were. Then the Towers came down. Overnight, the feds shifted three-quarters of their personnel into anti-terrorism and the mob made a comeback. Shit, they even made a fortune overcharging for debris removal from Ground Zero.... 9/11 saved the mafia. — Don Winslow

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

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

Mexico is a cemetery for secrets. — Don Winslow

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

A great review is great. A bad review is the worst. — Don Winslow

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

I have to remind the people who put down East Coast surfing that Kelly Slater is from Florida. — Don Winslow

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

We go off the meds and elect Richard Nixon, the Nurse Ratched of the American political psych ward. — Don Winslow

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

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

When the devil comes, he comes on angel's wings. — Don Winslow

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

Life, he muses, always gives you an excuse to take what you want anyway. — Don Winslow

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 would prefer things to be peaceful and not have conflict. — Don Winslow

So I thought I should write five pages a day. And that's what I did. Eventually I had a book. — Don Winslow

Just across the bridge is the gigantic marketplace, the insatiable consumer machine that drives the violence here. North Americans smoke the dope, snort the coke, shoot the heroin, do the meth, and then have the nerve to point south (down, of course, on the map), and wag their fingers at the "Mexican drug problem" and Mexican corruption. — Don Winslow

Americans take their strength in victories, Mexicans' strength is in their ability to suffer loss. — Don Winslow

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

you do not avenge a murder by killing - you avenge it by living. — Don Winslow

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

Maybe, Keller thinks, I've become too used to solitude. Maybe I like it too much. — Don Winslow

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

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

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

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

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

...'would have' is just another way of saying 'didn't. — Don Winslow

Maybe money can't buy happiness, but it can rent it for a long time. — Don Winslow

Keller had a professor in college who said that civilization was a matter of plumbing. That basically, the infrastructure for moving clean water in and filthy water out is what allowed people to congregate in large populations in permanent dwellings and create cities and cultures. Otherwise, people had to be nomads to literally escape their own shit. — Don Winslow

I was a safari guide in the 1980s in Kenya. — Don Winslow

Together, Ben and Chon make up a collective pacifist. Ben is the paci Chon is the fist. — Don Winslow

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

She's also ruthless - it's love me or off with your head. She's the Red Queen — Don Winslow

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

And the most dangerous place on earth - Is where you're safe. — Don Winslow

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

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

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

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

Grande is Mexico's harshest and most secure prison, and — Don Winslow

Nasty Ass got his street name because he always smells like he has a round in the chamber. If — Don Winslow

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

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

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

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

Satan can only tempt you with what you already have. — Don Winslow

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

Tell me you don't want to do those women on Fox News," Jimena says. "Tell me you don't," Giorgio counters. "Anyway, of course I do. I want to convert them through the subversive power of the orgasm." "So it would be a political act," Jimena says. "I am willing to sacrifice myself for the cause," Giorgio answers. — Don Winslow

he's not sure how safe this meeting is going to be. And — Don Winslow

Just a short while ago the Republicans were objects of fear and hatred - now they're just pathetic assholes. Barry took them to the paint and cut their throats. (O-BAM-a!) Now they walk around like white frat boys in Bed-Stuy, talking tough to show they aren't scared as the urine streams down their chinos into their cordovans. Obama has these dweebs so turned around all they can do is get behind some fat junkie DJ, a gibberish-spewing PsychoBimbette from the Far North, and a tele-dork who gives adrenaline-crazed, 1950s-style "chalk talks" (speaking of little white dicks) like some health-class instructor in a sex-offender unit. — Don Winslow

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

Keller has long believed that you have to be lucky to be good, but not good to be lucky. — Don Winslow

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

Not in San Salvador, he thinks, where the shanty slums press against gleaming high-rises like the thatched huts of medieval peasants pressed against castle walls. Except these castle walls are patrolled by private security guards wielding automatic rifles and machine pistols. And at night, the guards venture out from the castle walls and ride through the villages ...and slaughter the peasants, leaving their bodies at crossroads and in the middle of village squares, and rape and kill women and execute children in front of their parents.

So the survivors will know their place.

It's a killing ground, Art thinks.

El Salvador.

The Savior, my ass. — Don Winslow

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

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

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

Even a North American defense lawyer is right sometimes," Aguilar says. "Like a broken clock, twice a day. — Don Winslow

You can either love," Pablo says, "or you can talk about it. You can't do both. — Don Winslow

Six bad hombres have tried to kill Ramos. Ramos went to all six funerals, just in case any of the bereaved wanted to take a shot at revenge. None of them did. He calls his Uzi "Mi Esposa" - my wife. He's thirty-two years old. Within hours he has in custody the three policemen who picked up Ernie Hidalgo. One of them is the chief of the Jalisco State Police. Ramos tells Art, "We can do this the fast way or the slow way." Ramos takes two cigars from his shirt pocket, offers one to Art and shrugs when he refuses it. He takes a long time to light the cigar, rolling it so that the tip lights evenly, then takes a long pull and raises his black eyebrows at Art. The theologians are right, Art thinks - we become what we hate. Then he says, "The fast way." Ramos says. "Come back in a little while." "No," Art says. "I'll do my part." "That's a man's answer," Ramos says. "But I don't want a witness. — Don Winslow

This violent state of mind.
This violent state of mine. — Don Winslow

Shit," Pablo says. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

My problem is not that there are too few ideas out there. It's that there are too many. — Don Winslow

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

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

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

Their only weapon is shame, if the powerful can even feel it. — Don Winslow

The lost, the lonely, the bicultural misfits with a foot in two worlds and a place in neither. — Don Winslow

A lot of existential questions will be answered just after the "Fuck." As in life itself. — Don Winslow

He became his own blues song, a Tom Waits loser, a Kerouac saint, a Springsteen hero under the lights of the American highway and the neon glow of the American strip. A fugitive, a sharecropper, a hobo, a cowboy who knows that he's running out of prairie but rides anyway because there's nothing left but to ride. — Don Winslow

Beware the hospitality of the sociopath. — Don Winslow

They say that love conquers all. They're wrong, Keller thinks. Hate conquers all. It even conquers hate. — Don Winslow

Your strengths are your weaknesses.

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

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

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

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

Perhaps loneliness - it is that loneliest time of the night, the predawn darkness when the worst dreams come, the sunrise seems far off, and the creatures that inhabit both the real world and the darker edges of the unconscious prowl with the impunity of predators who know that their prey is helpless and alone. — Don Winslow

Perhaps we're not the greater good, but we are the lesser of evils. — Don Winslow