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" My father was a builder. During my high school years, I worked for him. One summer, I was working with a guy who had just come back from Vietnam and had been a tunnel rat. He wouldn't talk about the experience, but it sounded really scary to me. "

Michael Connelly

School

Experience

High School

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" I got lucky, and the first book, 'The Black Echo,' got published. "

" I write puzzles and mysteries. Nothing too highfalutin. "

" I could not have been happier with 'The Lincoln Lawyer.' They got the essence, and the casting, starting with McConaughey, was just perfect. "

" People like the Bosch books because they like Harry Bosch, not because the plots are fantastic. "

" We want our government to protect us, to make sure something like 9/11 never happens again. We quickly moved to give law enforcement more power to do this. But that now begs the question, did we move to fast? Did we give too much power away? I don't have the answer. "

" What is overriding that and most important is that readers generally are interested in a good character. They might be more comfortable with Harry because they think they know him, but they always seem willing to give somebody new a chance. "

" The TV audience is way bigger than a book audience, and no matter what I do, I'm always thinking if this will help people read my books. "

" I think it's pretty apparent who my favorites are because I keep coming back to them. At the top of that list would be Harry Bosch, who's now going on 20 years of literary life. I still like him the best because there's still a lot to say about him. "

" The fulfillment I get from a good day of writing is addictive and will always bring me back the next day. "

Michael Connelly

Good Day

Writing

" I've always thought of L.A. as the modern version of 'The Garden of Earthly Delights.' "

" This next to never happens, but if I had time to sit on a beach and read, I wouldn't read a cozy. But I've read cozies. That's how I got interested in crime fiction: because my mother was a soft-boiled reader. "

" 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. "

" I have a large collection of biographies about jazz musicians. "

" As a writer, you look for inspiration wherever you can get it. "

" In the real world, some defense lawyers never have an innocent client in their whole career. "

" Writing a screenplay is so spare, it kind of reminded me that I really should celebrate what I can do in a book, which is description: for example, places, people, locations. "

" I like stories about people who have to go into darkness for a good reason and then have to figure out how to deal with the darkness that seeps into their souls. "

Michael Connelly

Darkness

Good

" When I was a teenager, I was a voracious reader of crime fiction, but only contemporary books. I was not interested in reading 'The Glass Key' or 'The Maltese Falcon' - stuff that was 40 or 50 years old. "

" There is a prevailing school of thought that something good must take time, sometimes years to create and hone. I have always felt that the books I have written fastest have been my best - because I caught an unstoppable momentum in the writing. "

" The characters I write about are very internal. "

" I never miss L.A. because I'm there enough. "

" I'm one hundred percent Irish, and I'm very proud that I'm Irish American, though I don't know exactly where my ancestors came from. I just know County Cork. "

" When I was at a newspaper, I knew what an opportunity that was, and I religiously protected my time on the cop beat. "

" What brought me to the table was Raymond Chandler and, to a lesser degree, Ross Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett. I was basically inspired to want to write like the classic private-eye writers. "

" When I lived in L.A. full time, I moved often - fourteen different neighbourhoods in sixteen years. "

" 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. "

" 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

Law Enforcement

Job

" When I went home at 20 to tell my parents, 'I don't want to be an engineer, I want to try and write books,' I was braced for, 'That's not gonna happen.' But I didn't get that response, and maybe it was because of my dad's experience of having an artistic dream and having to put it aside. "

" Ross McDonald had a greater influence on me than any other writer. His style of writing, the repeated theme of the past coming out to grab somebody, that's very attractive to me as a reader and, now, as a writer. "

Michael Connelly

Style

Past

" In 1995, I sold the rights to Harry Bosch to Paramount. They had several screenplays written, but a movie never happened. Harry Bosch went on the shelf, and I had to wait 15 years to get him back. "