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

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.

Arnold Bennett was a writer I admired. He was actually taking notes at his father's deathbed.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.

A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.

It's essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied.

I was never really a writer, I was always more of a performer.

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.

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with.

Nowadays I'm not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

You know, Mamet is not a huge writer of female parts. Most of his movies don't even have women in them, so I'm lucky I'm in it at all.

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.

In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.

I knew I wasn't a baseball writer. I was scared to death. I really was afraid to talk to players, and I didn't want to go into the press box because I thought I was faking it.

A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.