Top 200 Michael Connelly Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “All around them the cacophony of greed carried on in its most glorious and extreme excess.”

— Michael Connelly

103. “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

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

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

— Michael Connelly

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

111. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

114. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

123. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

137. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

139. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

143. “Bosch had always thought it wasn’t a bad way to go – doing what you loved.”

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

145. “Did you know that this year the Pentagon told all members of the military not to do DNA kits because of the security issues they pose?”

— Michael Connelly

146. “Christian Scott.”

— Michael Connelly

147. “The alley was like most any other alley in a city where the infrastructure was crumbling, in a state where the infrastructure was crumbling. It was a patchwork of asphalt spot repairs and loose gravel over a crumbling base of decades-old concrete.”

— Michael Connelly

148. “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

149. “It had been one of the biggest landgrabs in the city’s history and Bosch knew the story well, having tried all his life to counter his love of baseball and the Dodgers with the ugly story buried beneath the diamond where, as a boy, he watched Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale pitch. It seemed to him that every gleaming success in the city had a dark seam to it somewhere, usually just out of view.”

— Michael Connelly

150. “On my way out of rent-a-car row I saw a sign with an arrow pointing the way to Paradise Road. I thought that everybody needed a sign like that. I wished that it was that easy.”

— Michael Connelly