Top 200 Michael Connelly Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “All around them the cacophony of greed carried on in its most glorious and extreme excess.”

— Michael Connelly

102. “Bosch counted twenty-two names and it made him miss the old Los Angeles Times. In 1993 it was big and strong, its editions fat with ads and stories produced by a staff of some of the best and brightest journalists in their field. Now the paper looked like somebody who had been through chemo – thin, unsteady, and knowing the inevitable could only be held off for so long.”

— Michael Connelly

103. “I realize now I could have gotten a whole book out of that and so I think that was a big mistake. But the truth is you write in the moment and with your head down and there is no way back then that I could have conceived of Harry having the longevity that he has had.”

— Michael Connelly

104. “Everybody’s got a cage that keeps out the sharks. Those who open the door and venture out do so at their own risk.”

— Michael Connelly

105. “Bosch always thought that if you started with the assumption that murder is an unreasonable action, then how could there ever be a fully reasonable explanation for it? It was that understanding that kept him from watching and being able to enjoy films and television shows about detectives. He found them unrealistic in their delivery of what the general audience wanted: all of the answers.”

— Michael Connelly

106. “There were elegantly made up women sitting on bus benches who were not really women and not really waiting for buses.”

— Michael Connelly

107. “I view people two ways. They’re either eye-for-an-eye people or they are turn-the-cheek people.”

— Michael Connelly

108. “I’m going to have to be impressed and feel confident in the people I’m handing a book to – or I’m not going to do it. Once you hand it to them, you’re out. You have no control over it.”

— Michael Connelly

109. “I fully acknowledge that it is easier to knock something down than to build it in the first place. But.”

— Michael Connelly

110. “When people think they have discovered or earned a certain knowledge on their own, they are more apt to hold on to it.”

— Michael Connelly

111. “But before I left,” Rider continued, “I learned enough to know that most often sexual abuse of children comes from inside the family, relatives or close friends. The boogey monsters who climb through the window and abduct are few and far between.”

— Michael Connelly

112. “But when Bosch opened the files as part of his cold-case review, he took a different approach. He had always operated according to the axiom that everybody counts in this world or nobody counts. This belief dictated that he must give each case and each victim his best effort.”

— Michael Connelly

113. “For Bosch such cynical thoughts came easily. He had been around the block a few times.”

— Michael Connelly

114. “Action and adventure on land and sea-you can’t ask for more. But Robert Kurson raises the ante in Pirate Hunters with an array of mystery and a fleet of colorful characters spanning four centuries. This is a great summer read!”

— Michael Connelly

115. “More inmates died of suicide than the needle on death row in California.”

— Michael Connelly

116. “Ingeniously plotted and executed, Print the Legend is an epic masterpiece from Craig McDonald. Beginning to end, I was riveted by this story of character, history and intrigue.”

— Michael Connelly

117. “Out of the blue and into the black is what they called going into a tunnel. Each one was a black echo. Nothing but death in there. But, still, they went.”

— Michael Connelly

118. “I’m not ‘Mr. No-By-The-Book.’ I just want to make sure the character is by the book.”

— Michael Connelly

119. “A man who looks guilty is found guilty.”

— Michael Connelly

120. “I feel I’m functioning at some level as a journalist because even though I write fiction, I’m trying to get the world accurate.”

— Michael Connelly

121. “I don’t think anyone will believe me, but I’ve never been pressured by a publisher to churn out a book.”

— Michael Connelly

122. “You see, the past is what you make of it. You can use it to hurt yourself or others or you can use it to make yourself strong. I’m strong, Harry. Now, tell me why you came to vist me today.”

— Michael Connelly

123. “The next ten minutes took ten hours.”

— Michael Connelly

124. “You know what they call a guy who switches sides in homicide? They call him a Jane Fonda, as in hanging with the North Vietnamese. You get it? It’s crossing to the dark side.”

— Michael Connelly

125. “I’ve been able to write at least one book a year for 20 years, and I don’t think I would’ve had that kind of drive if I hadn’t come out of the journalism business.”

— Michael Connelly

126. “The digital world was always billed as a great advancement but he remained skeptical.”

— Michael Connelly

127. “To write more from memory and to be more creative – I think – because I am still writing about Los Angeles but I can’t walk out my door and immediately drive to places I am writing about. So I think it has been a very good change for me after 11 books to start writing this way.”

— Michael Connelly

128. “If we can’t be honest with ourselves, how can we ever tell the truth to the people out there?”

— Michael Connelly

129. “She had said she was strong but he knew that comfort and strength could come from sadness. That was what she had.”

— Michael Connelly

130. “She’s interested in Japanese history right now, so that’s what I’m reading to her. And there’s this saying they have about conformist society: The nail that sticks out gets pounded down.”

— Michael Connelly

131. “I was enamored of detectives as a teenager. I liked what they did – piecing things together, thinking about situations. But to get there? Eight to ten years in a patrol car? I didn’t have that in me. I didn’t want to tell people what to do.”

— Michael Connelly

132. “If you go into darkness, the darkness goes into you.”

— Michael Connelly

133. “When you find the one that you think fits, then grab on for dear life.”

— Michael Connelly

134. “I wrote my first real murder story as a journalist for the Daytona Beach News Journal in 1980. It was about a body found in the woods. Later, the murder was linked to a serial killer who was later caught and executed for his crimes.”

— Michael Connelly

135. “We want the truth, Detective. You are confusing that with what we choose to tell the public.”

— Michael Connelly

136. “Take every case personally and you get angry. It builds a fire. It gives you the edge you need to go the distance every time out.”

— Michael Connelly

137. “The character can never be static from book to book. People might think you just come up with a new plot and stick this guy in. Well, he has to be as new as the plot every time.”

— Michael Connelly

138. “I felt sympathy for her but not too much. Idealism dies hard with everybody.”

— Michael Connelly

139. “No Way Back is my kind of novel – a tough, taut thriller – Mofina knows the world he writes about.”

— Michael Connelly

140. “The doctor told her that more than thirty cops had showed up the night of her surgery to donate blood for her. He gave her a list of names. Many were from the late.”

— Michael Connelly

141. “When I am so intensely involved with writing my books I don’t like to reread them.”

— Michael Connelly

142. “Livingstone had said sympathy was no substitute for action. That was an essential brick in Bosch’s wall. He had built himself as a man of action and, at the moment when the integrity of his life’s work had been called into question by a man on death row, he had chosen to turn his sympathy for Elizabeth Clayton into action.”

— Michael Connelly

143. “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

144. “Bremmer stared uneasily and Bosch dismissed him with his hand. The reporter closed the door and went to his own car.”

— Michael Connelly

145. “Maybe it has something to do with being a reporter for a long time that I don’t look to newspapers and television and so forth for inspiration most of the time.”

— Michael Connelly

146. “Darkness waits. All things come to the dark.”

— Michael Connelly

147. “That’s justice,” she said, nodding at the statue. “She doesn’t hear you. She doesn’t see you. She can’t feel you and won’t speak to you. Justice, Detective Bosch, is just a concrete blonde.”

— Michael Connelly

148. “And when they were finally naked they moved.”

— Michael Connelly

149. “Any writer would rather dig into character than dig into fancy plots.”

— Michael Connelly

150. “Everybody has a need for their past, Bosch thought. Sometimes it pulls harder on you than the future.”

— Michael Connelly