Top 60 Robert Crais Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Efficiency and focus are the keys to success.”

— Robert Crais

Featured in: Focus Quotes

2. “A man with friends is the wealthiest man in the world.”

— Robert Crais

3. “If my vision was good enough, I’d be an astronaut.”

— Robert Crais

4. “Sometimes I am so dry that people don’t know I’m kidding and think I’m being serious. I enjoy this because their reactions are often funny.”

— Robert Crais

5. “People want you to be ordinary. They don’t like it when people are different. They don’t like it when a man soars over their heads while they stand in the dirt. People hate you when you’re special; it reminds them of everything that they aren’t.”

— Robert Crais

6. “I admire people who re-create themselves. And it seems to me that what gives us all the opportunity to be heroic in our own lives is that we work to heal ourselves and be better than we were yesterday.”

— Robert Crais

7. “Everyone knows dogs. Most people love dogs. I think most American families probably have a dog, but I don’t think people really realize or understand just how wonderful and special dogs are.”

— Robert Crais

8. “Everything we are is anchored in our childhoods. The drama comes in how we deal with it. Are we slaves to our past, or can we rise above it? This is the stuff of great stories.”

— Robert Crais

9. “I have these huge black foam boards on the wall, and tacked to them, I have these white punch cards with my story ideas, scenes and notes.”

— Robert Crais

10. “Prove yourself brave, truthful, and unselfish, and someday you will be a real boy.’ The Blue Fairy said that. In Pinocchio.”

— Robert Crais

11. “Some of us find our way with a single light to guide us; others lose themselves even when the star field is as sharp as a neon ceiling. Ethics may not be situational, but feelings are. We learn to adjust, and, over time, the stars we use to guide ourselves come to reside within rather than without.”

— Robert Crais

12. “At Lackland Air Force Base, they make an effort to retrain military dogs that suffer from PTSD. It’s a lengthy, long process. The treatment is much the same as it would be for people, but it’s a difficult road back.”

— Robert Crais

13. “I’m a big brown mouse, I go marching through the house, and I’m not afraid of anything! I.”

— Robert Crais

14. “I was digging for stuff in a used bookstore, and I came upon ‘Little Sister.’ I fell in love with Chandler that night. I fell right down the rabbit hole of crime fiction.”

— Robert Crais

15. “The sense of smell in all dogs is their primary doorway to the world around them.”

— Robert Crais

16. “My family was all police and hard hats at the refineries; they didn’t know what to think about me. So I became a closet writer.”

— Robert Crais

17. “What they smell isn’t the emotion of fear. What dogs can smell is the changes in a person’s skin that suggest fear to the dog, anxiety, the way your skin sweats, the amount of uric acid that suddenly pours out of your pores.”

— Robert Crais

18. “A dog could see your heart in your eyes, Budress told him, and dogs were drawn to our hearts.”

— Robert Crais

19. “My fiction is almost always inspired by a character’s need or desire to rise above him- or herself. No one is perfect and some of us have much adversity in our lives; it is those people who struggle to rise above their nature or background that I find the most interesting and heroic.”

— Robert Crais

20. “Lucy took a single plain donut from the bag and held it for me to take a bite. Tender and light and still warm from the frying. Not too sugary.”

— Robert Crais

21. “Adults always wonder what to say and how to say it when they’re talking to a child. You want to be wise, but all you are is a child yourself in a larger body. Nothing is ever what it seems. The things that you think you know are never certain. I know that now. I wish that I didn’t, but I do.”

— Robert Crais

22. “I had a big Akita, Yoshi, who was fabulous. I loved him. We lost him when he was 12, and I’ve never been able to replace him. Normally, most people lose a pet and get another and keep going on. But it just felt wrong to me; it felt disloyal.”

— Robert Crais

23. “People want you to be ordinary.”

— Robert Crais

24. “Patrol dogs and Military Working Dogs were trained to protect their handlers. If the handler was attacked, and unconscious, or fighting for his or her life, the dog had to know what to do without being told. As Leland said, “These animals aren’t robots, goddamnit! They think! You train her up right, this beautiful dog will watch your back better than a squad of goddamned Marines!”

— Robert Crais

25. “Los Angeles is the evolutionary edge.”

— Robert Crais

26. “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.”

— Robert Crais

27. “It’s easy to sound good. All you do is leave in the parts where you act tough and forget the parts where you get shoved around.”

— Robert Crais

28. “I write characters and stories that move me, and I write from the heart.”

— Robert Crais

29. “She asked me why I always had something flip to say. I said that I didn’t know, but having been blessed with the gift, I felt obliged to use it.”

— Robert Crais

30. “I love the fact that you collaborate with your readers when you write a book.”

— Robert Crais

31. “When dogs fulfill their roles they are ecstatically happy.”

— Robert Crais

32. “My books come to me in images, and sometimes the image is at the beginning of the book, and sometimes it’s simply a flash somewhere in the middle.”

— Robert Crais

33. “Dogs give us something just as we give something to them.”

— Robert Crais

34. “Pike put down the cat. He slid from Pike’s arms like molasses and puddled at his feet.”

— Robert Crais

35. “Waiting doesn’t look like much, but it is something very important. Waiting is passive hunting.”

— Robert Crais

36. “That dog is a Marine!”

— Robert Crais

37. “Every second we have with these fine animals is a blessing. No creature, human or otherwise, will love you with such devotion, or trust you so fully. Remember this, Officer James. These dogs will lay their precious hearts bare to you, and hold back no part for themselves. Can anyone else in your pathetic excuse for a life say the same? Such trust is a gift from God Almighty above, so best you be worthy.”

— Robert Crais

38. “She said, “Oh, Studly.” I could see her smile. “The law is not about justice. You know that.”

— Robert Crais

39. “The buzz cut and his friend came over. “You are coming with us.” The buzz cut spoke the words with a careful, starched pronunciation that made me think of Arnold Schwarzenegger, only the accent was Russian. “Sez who?” I can slay ’em with these comebacks.”

— Robert Crais

40. “This man took my last son. No one could claim my hurt, or my anger. No one could have a greater claim on this one’s life.” Her voice was tight and fierce. She patted Ray’s arm. “There’s been enough killing down here. We have to find a way to live without the killing.”

— Robert Crais

41. “I looked like an ad for Banana Republic. Maybe Banana Republic would give me a job. They could put my picture in their little catalog and under it they could say: Elvis Cole, famous detective, outfitted for his latest adventure in rugged inner-city climes!”

— Robert Crais

42. “There isn’t so much love in the world that you can turn it away when it’s offered.”

— Robert Crais

43. “People often die from love, and this is a secret we all keep, even from ourselves.”

— Robert Crais

44. “LARKIN WATCHED Pike leaving, and in the moment he stepped outside, he was framed in the open door of their Echo Park house like a picture in a magazine, frozen in time and space. A big man, but not a giant. More average in size than not. With the sleeves covering his arms, and his face turned away, he seemed heartbreakingly normal, which made her love him even more. A superman risked nothing, but an average man risked everything.”

— Robert Crais

45. “A fine layer of ash had blown into the carport, showing a single set of cat prints going from the side of the house to the cat hatch built into my door. People in Minnesota see things like this with snow.”

— Robert Crais

46. “Throughout the meal Lucy would grin with the knowledge of her secret, and I would ask, “What?” and she would say, “You’ll see.” Then everyone stopped looking at Johnny Depp and turned toward the door. Lucy grinned wider, and I looked, too. Joe came over, gliding across the floor as the room parted for him. Tall men in sleeveless sweatshirts and dark glasses and brilliant red tattoos tend to stand out in Spago. Even Johnny Depp was looking.”

— Robert Crais

47. “That Sunday, the sun floated bright and hot over the Los Angeles basin, pushing people to the beaches and the parks and into backyard pools to escape the heat. The air buzzed with the nervous palsy it gets when the wind freight-trains in from the deserts, dry as bone, and cooking the hillsides into tar-filled kindling that can snap into flames hot enough to melt an auto body.”

— Robert Crais

48. “She fingered the card and looked at the younger man. “James Edward, did you offer the man a cool drink?” James Edward said, “You want a Scrapple?”

— Robert Crais

49. “Officer Pike took off his dark glasses, and looked at her. She felt her breath catch. His eyes were the most liquid blue, the blue of the sky over the high deserts of Sonora, the blue of the ocean where it has no bottom and is infinitely clean. But it wasn’t the blue that stopped her breath. For just a moment when the glasses were first pulled away, she could have sworn that those eyes were filled with the most terrible and long-endured pain. Then the pain was gone and there was only the blue.”

— Robert Crais

50. “Sometimes. Sometimes you can change what’s there, sometimes what’s there changes you.”

— Robert Crais