Top 200 Michael Connelly Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Everybody counts or nobody counts.”

— Michael Connelly

Featured in: Accountability Quotes

2. “Money. The ultimate motivation. The ultimate way of keeping score.”

— Michael Connelly

3. “Can’t complain because nobody listens.”

— Michael Connelly

4. “The best crime novels are not about how a detective works on a case; they are about how a case works on a detective.”

— Michael Connelly

5. “I mean like with the love of your life. Everybody’s got one person out there. One bullet. And if you’re lucky in life, you get to meet that person. And once you do, once you’re shot through the heart, then there’s nobody else. No matter what happens – death, divorce, infidelity, whatever – nobody else can ever come close. That’s the single-bullet theory.”

— Michael Connelly

6. “Reasonable Doubt for a Reasonable Fee. Call the Lincoln Lawyer. Bosch.”

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

8. “What is jealousy but a reflection of your own failures?”

— Michael Connelly

9. “There were a billion lights out there on the horizon and I knew that all of them put together weren’t enough to light the darkness in the hearts of some men.”

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

11. “Write every day even if it is just a paragraph.”

— Michael Connelly

12. “I saw a sneak preview of Jack Reacher and give two thumbs up to Tom Cruise. He did a great job with the role.”

— Michael Connelly

13. “There is no client as scary as an innocent man.”

— Michael Connelly

14. “You can fall in love and make love many times but there is only one bullet with your name etched on the side. And if you are lucky enough to be shot with that bullet then the wound never heals.”

— Michael Connelly

15. “The art of sports writing always amazed me. Nine out of ten times the reader already knows the outcome of your story before reading it. They know who won, they probably even watched the game. But they read about it anyway and you have to find a way to write with an insight and angle that makes it seem fresh.”

— Michael Connelly

16. “What happens when you eat too much alphabet soup?” “What?” “You have a vowel movement.”

— Michael Connelly

17. “Swag?” “Scientific wild ass guess.”

— Michael Connelly

18. “It’s lucky no one else knows what our most secret thoughts are. We’d all be seen for the cunning, self-aggrandizing fools we are.”

— Michael Connelly

19. “In the law of innocence, for every man not guilty of a crime, there is a man out there who is. And to prove true innocence, the guilty man must be found and exposed to the world.”

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

21. “Momentum was momentum, whether you found it in music or on the street or in the beat of your own heart.”

— Michael Connelly

22. “In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is equalized with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that’s in the long run. We must live in the short run and matters are often unjust there. The compensating for us of the universe makes all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process.”

— Michael Connelly

23. “Through studying the past we learn our future.”

— Michael Connelly

24. “People are the worst animals,” Rider said. “They will do anything to each other. Just to indulge their fantasies.”

— Michael Connelly

25. “But then the world changes and your own DNA can unlock everything and secrets aren’t secrets anymore.”

— Michael Connelly

26. “He also knew that if he waited, somehow he would see, that there was lost light in all places of darkness, and if he found it, it would save him.”

— Michael Connelly

27. “What is important is not what you hear said, it’s what you observe.”

— Michael Connelly

28. “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

29. “It’s a left-brain right-brain thing. People are more agreeable toward people on their left.”

— Michael Connelly

30. “The black heart does not beat alone.”

— Michael Connelly

31. “There is no end of things in the heart.”

— Michael Connelly

32. “You can’t patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.”

— Michael Connelly

33. “The law was not about truth. It was about negotiation, amelioration, manipulation.”

— Michael Connelly

34. “The house in Silverlake was dark, its windows as empty as a dead man’s eyes. It was an old California Craftsman with a full front porch and two dormer windows set on the long slope of the roof. But no light shone behind the glass, not even from above the doorway. Instead, the house cast a foreboding darkness about it that not even the glow from the streetlight could penetrate. A man could be standing there on the porch and Bosch knew he probably wouldn’t be able to see him. ‘You.”

— Michael Connelly

35. “King retired about five years ago and moved to East Bumfuck, Idaho – somewhere out in the woods with no phone and no internet. He went completely off the grid. She.”

— Michael Connelly

36. “He called them human tumbleweeds moving with the winds of fate.”

— Michael Connelly

37. “He knew there were two kinds of truth in this world. The truth that was the unalterable bedrock of one’s life and mission. And the other, malleable truth of politicians, charlatans, corrupt lawyers, and their clients, bent and molded to serve whatever purpose was at hand.”

— Michael Connelly

38. “From the beginning, she had left a hole in my heart that could never quite heal. I could go years without seeing her but I could never stop thinking about her. Thinking about where she was, what she was doing, who she was with.”

— Michael Connelly

39. “Somebody once called the media the merchants of chaos.”

— Michael Connelly

40. “Civil unrest occurs when the feelings of overwhelming powerlessness hit critical mass.”

— Michael Connelly

41. “Deep in my heart it still feels like I’m a journalist even though I haven’t worked for a paper and carried a press pass for 14 years.”

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

43. “There is nothing like the start of a season, before all the one-run losses, pitching breakdowns and missed opportunities. Before reality sets in.”

— Michael Connelly

44. “You can become unhinged and cut loose from the world. You can believe you are a permanent outsider. But the innocence of a child will bring you back and give you the shield of joy with which to protect yourself. I have learned this late in life but not too late. It’s never too late.”

— Michael Connelly

45. “Nobody in this world is who they say they are. Nobody. Not when they’re in their own room with the door shut and locked. And nobody knows anybody, no matter what they think... The best you can hope for is to know yourself. And sometimes when you do, when you see your true self, you have to turn away.”

— Michael Connelly

46. “The sins of the father, he thought. His life and his world had once again clobbered his daughter. If he vowed to make those who did this pay, didn’t that include himself?”

— Michael Connelly

47. “Darkness waits. But it comes no matter what you do.”

— Michael Connelly

48. “The only way to prove I didn’t do it is to prove who did,” I said. “That’s the law of innocence.”

— Michael Connelly

49. “Dirty four. It’s what some geneticists call the DRD4 gene.”

— Michael Connelly

50. “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.”

— Michael Connelly