Top 200 Michael Connelly Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Past the dam the city spread out in a blanket of a million lights, which shimmered in the cool evening air like floating dreams.”

— Michael Connelly

52. “Whatever made her happy made me happy – except the time she thought divorcing me would make her life happier. That didn’t do much for me.”

— Michael Connelly

53. “The question of how you can hope and expect someone to forgive you when deep down you don’t forgive yourself.”

— Michael Connelly

54. “You know you’re going to get burned from time to time. It’s just part of the game. So when it happens you have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and forget about it because they’re about to snap the ball again.”

— Michael Connelly

55. “He’s dead: Internal bleeding. When they opened him up they found a toothbrush shiv lodged in the anal cavity. It was never determinded whether he’d put it up there for safe keeping himself or somebody else did it for him, but it was a good lesson for the rest of the inmates. They even put up a sign. “Never put sharp objects up your ass.”

— Michael Connelly

56. “I love movies. Movies have influenced me as a writer.”

— Michael Connelly

57. “Now I’m writing about contemporary Los Angeles from memory. My process was to hang out, observe, research what I was writing about, and almost immediately go back to my office and write those sections. So it was a very close transfer between observation and writing.”

— Michael Connelly

58. “Loneliness had been the trash can fire he huddled around for most of his life.”

— Michael Connelly

59. “As a bassist he could never really be a sideman. He was always the anchor. He drove the beat. even if it was behind Miles Davis’a horn.”

— Michael Connelly

60. “That’s the irony in the work: the best stories are the worst things that happen. My best times were somebody else’s worst.”

— Michael Connelly

61. “I once read a book about a reporter written by a reporter who described the life as always running in front of a thresher. I thought it was the most accurate description I’d read.”

— Michael Connelly

62. “I was simply in love with my daughter and how she viewed her world. The literal way in which she took it all in and took it on. I knew it wouldn’t last long and so I treasured every moment I saw and heard of it.”

— Michael Connelly

63. “The good ones all had that hollow space inside. The empty place where the fire always burns. For something. Call it justice. Call it the need to know. Call it the need to believe that those who are evil will not remain hidden in darkness forever.”

— Michael Connelly

64. “The paying jobs were few and she was often taken advantage of by the leeches who were part of the entertainment industry. But she persevered.”

— Michael Connelly

65. “It was the Holy Grail of detective work. It had nothing to do with evidence or legal procedure or probable cause. It was just knowing it in your gut. Nothing in her life beat it.”

— Michael Connelly

66. “Because it’s a hot door and we have to be careful. You never open a door on a burning room.”

— Michael Connelly

67. “The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.”

— Michael Connelly

68. “Are you like him?” she asked. “Who?” “Timido. Alone out there in the dark world.” “Sometimes. Everybody is sometimes.”

— Michael Connelly

69. “I don’t miss being a reporter as a job, but I do miss the everyday interaction with the front line of law enforcement. I still have a cadre of cops who keep me up to date, but I don’t have the access I used to.”

— Michael Connelly

70. “He looked at the old case file he had pulled and still held in his hand. He put the phone down on the coffee table and leaned back on the couch and opened the file.”

— Michael Connelly

71. “She refused to accept the simple truism that the better you were, the bigger threat you were to those at the top...”

— Michael Connelly

72. “He was a worn-out old man whose eyes had quit caring about anything but the odds on three-year-olds.”

— Michael Connelly

73. “Working homicide for so many years, Bosch could not be surprised anymore by the horrors people inflicted on each other. But the horrors people saved for themselves were a different story.”

— Michael Connelly

74. “The world was full of people who could not get over things. There was no closure and there was no peace. The truth did not set you free. But you could get through things. That’s what Bosch would tell him. You could head toward the light and climb and dig and fight your way out of the hole.”

— Michael Connelly

75. “Everybody has a jury, the voices they carry inside.”

— Michael Connelly

76. “In this country, there are two million people in prison. Two million. If the system gets it wrong one percent of the time, that is twenty thousand innocent people in jail. Lower it to half a percent and you’re still at ten thousand people. This is what keeps me up at night. Why I always say, the scariest client is the innocent man. Because there is so much at stake.”

— Michael Connelly

77. “Nobody should grow old.” “And everybody should get the chance.”

— Michael Connelly

78. “I didn’t have all the answers but experience told me that they would come.”

— Michael Connelly

79. “Shouldn’t death be the relief from the tortures of life?”

— Michael Connelly

80. “I found out who I was.”

— Michael Connelly

81. “He knew that you didn’t win justice by carrying a sign or a cardboard coffin. You earned it by being on the side of the righteous, by being unswayed from that.”

— Michael Connelly

82. “When I was a teenager, I was a voracious reader of crime fiction, but only contemporary books.”

— Michael Connelly

83. “Repeat offenders mean repeat customers and McGinley was both, as many of my clients tend to be.”

— Michael Connelly

84. “I think there’s a general misconception that anything written quickly lacks quality, and I don’t believe that.”

— Michael Connelly

85. “Bosch always thought that if you started with the assumption that murder is an unreasonable action, then how could there ever be a fully.”

— Michael Connelly

86. “When it came to opening statements, I was from the Legal Siegel school of law. He always said, save your powder, meaning less is more; don’t reveal your case or its surprises until it’s time to present your evidence.”

— Michael Connelly

87. “If you get into a game of talking to the media, you keep the story alive. Information is oxygen. Without it they die.”

— Michael Connelly

88. “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

89. “I think I would spend the first 30 weeks not writing, just clearing my head and seeing parts of the world I haven’t seen and going back to places I have seen and love.”

— Michael Connelly

90. “Guilt,” he said. “You have to get by it. Let the ghosts go or they’ll take you under and you’ll never be the lawyer you are supposed to be. You will never see the big picture.”

— Michael Connelly

91. “She was on a roll and everybody knew it. It was what cops and prosecutors called being in the tube. It was a surfing reference. It meant they had ridden the case into the water tunnel where everything was going smoothly and perfectly and was surrounding them in glorious balance.”

— Michael Connelly

92. “Search warrants designate a specific window of time during which the search must take place. Afterward, police must in a timely manner file a document with the court called a search-warrant return that lists exactly what was seized. It is then the judge’s responsibility to review the seizure to make sure that the police acted within the parameters of the warrant.”

— Michael Connelly

93. “The Chicago Way is a wonderful first novel. Michael Harvey has studied the masters and put his own unique touch on the crime novel. This book harkens the arrival of a major new voice.”

— Michael Connelly

94. “They need you until they don’t need you.”

— Michael Connelly

95. “Most criminal defendants talk their way into prison. Few talk their way out. The best single piece of advice I have ever given a client is to just keep your mouth shut. Talk to no one about your case, not even your own wife. You keep close counsel with yourself. You take the nickel and you live to fight another day.”

— Michael Connelly

96. “Every day you fight death with life and what is more vital in life than the physical act of love?”

— Michael Connelly

97. “I don’t remember what it stood for,” Ballard said. “I was on patrol in Pacific Division and I remember filling out the forms on the MDC. Geographic something or other.” “Geographic Reporting and Safety Program,” Bosch said. “The guys down in the ASS Office really worked some OT on it.” “Ass Office?” “The Acronym Selection Section. You never heard of it? They got about ten guys down there full-time.”

— Michael Connelly

98. “In a daydream sort of way, I think it would be pretty cool to direct a movie. But I have been on movie and TV sets and know it is hard work. I like directing it in my mind. It is easier.”

— Michael Connelly

99. “Writing does for me what you got in that glass does for you. If I can write about it, I can understand it. And I can put it in the ground. That’s all I want to do.”

— Michael Connelly

100. “I have always had the suspicion that officers assigned to front desk duty were chosen by cunning supervisors because of their skills in obfuscation and disinformation.”

— Michael Connelly