The trick if you are sitting at the defense table is to be patient. To wait. Not just for any lie. But for the one you can grab on to and forge like hot iron into a sharpened blade. You then use that blade to rip the case open and spill its guts on the floor.

Michael Connelly

If the system turns away from the abuses inflicted on the guilty, then who can be next but the innocents?

Michael Connelly

abuse guilty next

You can't patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.

Michael Connelly

ptsd band soul

It's only a wonderful world if you can make it that way. There are no street signs pointing to Paradise Road.

Michael Connelly

paradise way world

The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers' bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.

Michael Connelly

sunset home beautiful

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.

Michael Connelly

character book thinking

What is important is not what you hear said, it's what you observe.

Michael Connelly

important said

How I work is that I write a story I'd like to read. Then you fly to Paris or Sydney and the interviewers talk about the greater significance of your work.

Michael Connelly

paris stories writing

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more.

Michael Connelly

three twenties writing

The built-in form is a window frame. You can use this genre [crime fiction] to go where you want to go, and explore what you want to explore. In some ways it gives you a lot of freedom because you have a framework readers are looking for.

Michael Connelly

use giving fiction

There is no client as scary as an innocent man.

Michael Connelly

innocent-man scary men

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.

Michael Connelly

redemption quality art

Well, did he do it?" She always asked the irrelevant question. It didn't matter in terms of the strategy of the case whether the defendant "did it" or not. What mattered was the evidence against him -- the proof -- and if and how it could be neutralized. My job was to bury the proof, to color the proof a shade of gray. Gray was the color of reasonable doubt.

Michael Connelly

ifs-and color jobs

Everybody counts or nobody counts

Michael Connelly

Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really droppped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically -- any way you want to look at it -- everbody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case.

Michael Connelly

anchors dream running

There is nothing you can do about the past except keep it there.

Michael Connelly

moving-on heartbreak letting-go

...it is how a person goes about quenching his desires or living with them unrequited that the readers get a glimpse of his true character.

Michael Connelly

glimpse desire character

I've learned over the years that sometimes if you ask the same question more than once you get different responses.

Michael Connelly

different sometimes years

Any writer would rather dig into character than dig into fancy plots.

Michael Connelly

fancy plot character

A newspaper is the center of a community, it's one of the tent poles of the community, and that's not going to be replaced by Web sites and blogs.

Michael Connelly

tents newspapers community

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

Michael Connelly

movie-love