I enjoy adapting my own work, or anybody's work. I like to adapt books.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

The time has come for professional jurors.

The Onion Field made a real writer. And then I knew it was over, I couldn't be a cop anymore.

You've got people who are looking at DNA evidence and other evidence like that and they're ignoring it.

What is it about the component of fire? People have written about it. People have wondered about it.

Today, lawyers are attacking more; they're attacking everything. A good example is the O.J. Simpson case.

I enjoy adapting my own work, or anybody's work. I like to adapt books.

When I interview people accused of capital offenses, I never even ask if they did it. I would consider that unprofessional.

The O.J. Simpson case, they had no understanding of that DNA evidence, and didn't want to.

Civil servants take forever to do anything.

What I didn't know was that if I didn't stand with my back to the wall, Hollywood people would unscrew my ass and sell it down the river.

As a cop, I dealt with every kind of bum and criminal. They all have more integrity than some Hollywood people.

If you take 67 brush fires times 10 years, that's almost 700 right there. Those brush fires are incredibly dangerous, all those homes going down proved that.

I hadn't done anything in six years; I was just vegetating.

I certainly believe it's over for the jury system, but we won't admit it for a while.

Probably 95 percent of the things that are written never get on the screen.

When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice.

Every time I write a nonfiction book I get sued.

Jury selection is strictly an emotional process. They're looking for people they can manipulate. Both sides are.

I'm sure I took some licks at the system, and at trials and lawyers in general. I've seen enough of them for so many years both as a cop and a defendant in defamation cases.

The serial arsonist is the most difficult to apprehend because the evidence is burned up.

I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again.

The Onion Field, that one got pretty close to me because I was a cop when it happened. I saw some of the indifference that my police department showed to the surviving officer.

Civil servants take forever to do anything.

There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn't.

I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.

I was drawn to boxing because I got beat up as a kid. I was the kid with the piano books in a New York neighbourhood.

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

The proper study of mankind is books.

I have written about 10 books, all just practical encouragement for moms.

Whites were the winners, blacks were the losers, we wrote the history books, and they didn't feature.

Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.

You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.

Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist.

As I have studied the Bible and the Book of Mormon, I have come to know through the power of the Spirit of God, that these books contain the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

There are some friends you don't meet for twenty years and when you meet them again it's as if no twenty years has happened - you're lucky when that happens. I feel the same about books.

Then I found books that were written much later, as late as 15 years ago. It was very superficial material, but enough to tell me that the genesis of this story was worth exploring.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Well, it was actually - I brought the idea of doing a documentary to HBO back in 2000, when there were some press reports sort of were bandied about that there were going to TV movies based on some of the books that were out.

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.

I get letters from readers who say that they have always hated reading, but somebody suggested one of my books, they actually finished the book and enjoyed it, and they're going on to read another book. I'm thrilled that they have figured out that reading is fun.

I never buy magazines, I never even buy books.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Without books I would not have become a vivacious reader, and if you are not a reader you are not a writer.

Well see, I'm a good enough writer that not everybody in my books talks exactly like I do.

So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.