Explore Quotes by George Pelecanos

I'm a very sentimental, emotional person.

I'm proudly a crime writer, but it would be really inaccurate to call me a mystery writer.

In its rather clinical view of death, 'True Grit' rivals the hardboiled world of 'Red Harvest'-era Dashiell Hammett and prefigures Cormac McCarthy by 20 years.

Guys who feel like it makes you a man to make babies, they're completely misguided. It makes you a man to be a father. And I'm not moralising about marriage or anything. I understand that people split up, and marriages don't work out, and people do the best they can. But if you're going to not be there from the very beginning, then don't do it.

Every day I'm not working or writing is a wasted day to me.

My take on gentrification and change is it's usually always a better thing, because when you see all these businesses open and flourishing, that means there are more jobs.

Reading opens your mind and helps you understand and empathize with people who are unlike you and outside your breadth of experience.

I like writing about people who spend their time trying to help others for the greater good. That's what Americans are supposed to be about, right?

I do feel like that's what a writer does, is he goes into other people's heads.

I was a movie freak before I was a book lover.

Many fathers and sons never get to reconcile their differences or come to an understanding that fills the gap between love and expectations.

When I was a teenager, I thought if any of my friends or people at school see me reading a book, they're gonna think I'm weak. So I didn't even do it in private. Then I grew up, got into college, and the teachers turned me on to books, and I got hooked.

I'm a fast driver.

I never went to a writing school, so 'The Wire' was my writing school.

There was a hole in Washington fiction, I felt, when I started out. Most D.C. novels were about politics or the federal city or people who lived in Georgetown or Chevy Chase - it was definitely a very narrow focus.

It's a tradition that a writer will try to plant his flag in a certain city and protect that. The way to get your rep is to find the essence of the city and get it down on paper.

'True Grit' is one of the few books my sons let me read to them - and paid attention to - when they were younger.

Kids need a father around to make them whole. They need their mom.

I always overtip. When I go to England, people think I'm stupid.

I was 15 years old in 1972, and yeah, when the 1970s broke, I was out there. Everything was kinda swirling around me - the music, women, cars, the culture.

I get chills when I think that there's a statue of Phil Lynott on a street in Dublin, that people leave flowers by the statue. I love stuff like that.