Top 100 Don Winslow Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “He tells his guys, you change the oil in a Nissan, you just can’t kill it. You’ll die before that car will.”

— Don Winslow

52. “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

53. “Their only weapon is shame, if the powerful can even feel it.”

— Don Winslow

54. “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

55. “We are all cripples, Keller thinks, limping together through this crippled world. It’s what we owe to each other. Chuy goes inside. Keller sits outside on a bench and waits. The words of the psalm come back to him – “Be still and know that I am God.” There is nothing to do but be still.”

— Don Winslow

56. “Perhaps we’re not the greater good, but we are the lesser of evils.”

— Don Winslow

57. “His old priests might have told him there’s sins of commission not omission. It’s not always the things you do but the things you don’t do that will cost you your soul. Sometimes it’s not the spoken lie but the unspoken truth that opens the door to betrayal.”

— Don Winslow

58. “The toll of the “Mall shooting” was horrific, but not as bad as it could have been. Five dead and fourteen wounded. The aftermath was the usual – thoughts and prayers and talk about gun control and mental health and then absolutely nothing was done.”

— Don Winslow

59. “This look like college to you?” Malone asks. “You see coeds, Frisbees, man buns? You don’t take notes, you don’t write anything down. Only thing you ever write are your 5s. Notes you take on duty are discoverable. Some defense attorney shithead will deliberately misinterpret them and ram them up your ass on the stand.”

— Don Winslow

60. “Mexico is a cemetery for secrets.”

— Don Winslow

61. “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

62. “A man does the right thing, does his duty and does it bravely.”

— Don Winslow

63. “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

64. “Even a North American defense lawyer is right sometimes,” Aguilar says. “Like a broken clock, twice a day.”

— Don Winslow

65. “Our ends know our beginnings but the reverse isn’t true.”

— Don Winslow

66. “I’ll look out for him,” Keller said. Because he needs to. Call it penance, call it atonement or whatever the hell you want, he only knows that he needs to do it, that he can only find redemption by helping this boy find his, by showing love to what he hates, that at the end of the day or the end of the world, there are no separate souls. We will go to heaven or we will go to hell, but we will go together.”

— Don Winslow

67. “Mateo runs up and Pablo hugs him. It’s amazing, he thinks, that he never gets tired of that sensation.”

— Don Winslow

68. “Americans take their strength in victories, Mexicans’ strength is in their ability to suffer loss.”

— Don Winslow

69. “Guns and dope are the soup and sandwich of American crime.”

— Don Winslow

70. “The reaction at Manhattan South is going to go something like Someone blanked Eddie Friel? Oh. Anyone want this last chocolate glazed?”

— Don Winslow

71. “Let the word go forth from this time and place,” Taylor pronounced. “There is no secret unit operating in Mexico City, and it gets everything it needs from you. If Keller asks you for something, you don’t ask ‘why,’ you ask ‘when.’ If Keller wants a large pizza smothered with chocolate ice cream, French fries, and a cherry on top, you deliver it faster than Domino’s, no questions asked. You have any questions, come to me, but don’t have any questions. Are there any questions?”

— Don Winslow

72. “Grande is Mexico’s harshest and most secure prison, and.”

— Don Winslow

73. “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

74. “Well, that’s a big chunk of truth, Eddie thinks. 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. That stuff makes itself. They get made in the backseats of junk cars, and then they live in them.”

— Don Winslow

75. “Cops fall into two categories – grass eaters and meat eaters. The grass eaters are the small-timers – they take a cut from the car-towing companies, they get a free coffee, a sandwich. They take what comes, they’re not aggressive. The meat eaters are the predators, they go after what they want – the drug rips, the mob payoffs, the cash.”

— Don Winslow

76. “The past isn’t in the past. It’s always with us. In our history. Our minds, our blood.”

— Don Winslow

77. “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

78. “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

79. “There are the gods of place and the gods of commerce, and if you have to bet who’s going to win out, put your money on money every time.”

— Don Winslow

80. “I think you can use fiction to get inside people’s minds.”

— Don Winslow

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

— Don Winslow

82. “Life, he muses, always gives you an excuse to take what you want anyway.”

— Don Winslow

83. “At least Barrera didn’t stick the envelope into her panties.”

— Don Winslow

84. “Behavior that was cute when you were in your twenties becomes aggravating in your thirties, pathetic in your forties and tragic in your fifties.”

— Don Winslow

85. “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

86. “The ‘Mexican drug problem’ is not the Mexican drug problem. It is the American drug problem. We are the buyers, and without buyers, there can be no sellers.”

— Don Winslow

87. “Pablo Mora has one of those hangovers where you see yourself in the mirror and think you look familiar.”

— Don Winslow

88. “Why do women love to talk about love?” Giorgio asks. “Why don’t men, is more the question,” Ana says.”

— Don Winslow

89. “I eat chunky little boys like Sean Hannity for lunch.” True enough, Keller thinks. This woman faced down the goddamn Zetas. “We.”

— Don Winslow

90. “As in life itself.” Xue Xin chuckled. “Are we its guest, or its prisoner?”

— Don Winslow

91. “In America, everything is about systems,” Barrera said. “In Mexico, everything is about personal relationships.”

— Don Winslow

92. “Opiates are a response to pain. Physical pain, emotional pain, economic pain. He’s looking at all three. The Heroin Trifecta.”

— Don Winslow

93. “Maybe, Keller thinks, I’ve become too used to solitude. Maybe I like it too much.”

— Don Winslow

94. “I have to remind the people who put down East Coast surfing that Kelly Slater is from Florida.”

— Don Winslow

95. “You know the word ‘barbarian’ came from the Romans? It meant ‘redheaded.’ They was talking about you people. I saw that on the – what do you call it? – the History Channel, last night.”

— Don Winslow

96. “You can’t invite wolves to dinner and not expect them to eat.”

— Don Winslow

97. “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

98. “That’s all right, Neal thought. Every one of us is at least two people.”

— Don Winslow

99. “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

100. “The people, they don’t know what it takes sometimes to keep them safe and it’s better that they don’t.”

— Don Winslow