I am on my bike daily, and most of the locations, warehouses and specific residences from 'The Cut' were found while I was riding.
— George Pelecanos
I had met many wounded veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center when I was researching my 2009 novel 'The Turnaround,' and I continue to be very interested in how returning servicemen and women deal with their new lives back home and how they're treated by America.
I make a good spaghetti sauce and can mix a nice drink.
I never went to school for writing, never took a writing class, but when you're in a room with David Simon and Ed Burns and Dennis Lehane and Richard Price, and they're going over something you've written, you learn what works and what doesn't.
There's a room in my house where my stereo, records, CDs, and books are housed. I spend a lot of time in that room, sitting in my chair beside the fireplace, reading and listening to music. Sometimes I just stand before the shelves and look at my books, because every single one of them means something to me.
It would probably surprise people how prevalent reading is in institutions - and the degree to which some states discourage reading by instituting draconian rules and laws that try to limit and outright roadblock books in prisons.
There's nothing funny about violence. Death is a real thing.
For many years, I did ride-alongs with patrol cops, which is any citizen's right.
I can't relax. I don't have any hobbies.
My books are not for everybody.
I really feel like people who want to change things need to go out and change it themselves and not look to politicians to do that.
There are a lot of bars and shoe stores in my early books.
After college, I spent a decade working the kinds of jobs that I write about - bartender, shoe salesman, kitchen man - while voraciously reading novels.
At 11 years old, in 1968, my job was to deliver food on foot, so I spent my day walking around the city. I had an active imagination, jacked up by movies. I passed the time making up stories and serializing them.
I read 'The Washington Post' every day from a very young age. Reading the newspaper taught me how to organize my thoughts on the page. Meaning, it taught me how to write.
I like fiction set in the South, and I'm a fan of literary westerns.
'Random Rules' kicks off 'American Water,' and from its opening line - 'In 1984 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection' - you know you're in for something strange and special.
I've just been very interested in the living side of Washington, rather than the federal side, since I was a kid.
I was really rudderless at one point my life. And once I started reading books, then I got the idea that maybe I could become a writer. I had a goal. And every day when I got up, there was a reason.
I'm always working on my next novel, even when I'm not.
My goal is to get better with each book, and I feel like I am.
Incarcerated individuals want what most people want in a novel: good, honest writing and a story well told.
I even dream about writing. I'm talking seeing words across the page, whole paragraphs.
I used to sit in my pickup truck at 7 o'clock in the morning outside my office and listen to the Replacements or something full blast, thinking, 'What am I doing here?'
There is nothing like the rumble of a dual-piped American car with something under the hood.
I never took a writing class.
A lot of guys are walking around with a lot simmering beneath the surface, and sometimes it explodes.
I do miss the Chocolate City of my youth.
Sometimes I think 'The Wire' said it all, and I might as well not write any more crime novels.
My senior year at College Park, University of Maryland, I took an elective class in crime fiction taught by Charles C. Mish. He turned me on in a big way to reading and books. I was lucky to have a teacher who changed the course of my life.
I want to be read. When you write a TV show like 'The Wire,' you've got three to four million readers watching your work. Even Grisham doesn't sell that many books.
I collect and read as many books about music and film as I do fiction.
Richmond Fontaine bandleader Willy Vlautin writes songs akin to finely composed short stories set in the diners, bars, casinos, and old hotels of Reno and its environs.
My father was a Marine who fought in the Pacific in WW II. He was a very tough guy, but after the war, he lived his life in a quiet and reserved manner because he had nothing to prove. I know now that he internalized his war experience.
Every young man's best purchase is his first car, which spells freedom. My first one was a '70 Camaro, springtime gold-over-saddle, a 307 with Hi-jackers and chrome reverse mags.
When I was 19, my dad got sick, and I quit college to take over his business, a coffee shop on 19th Street, below Dupont Circle in D.C. I had been working there since I was 11 years old, so it was not a stretch to think that I could do it, but my record as a teenager, in many respects, was less than stellar.
'The Big Sky' is an American classic.
I don't judge anyone of any stripe by what they read. Reading is always good for you. It's a positive act.
I didn't want to write the same book over and over.
I shoot occasionally, but I'm no gun expert.
I owned a '70 Camaro for many years, which I loved.
I was heavily into John D. MacDonald.
My goal is to get a real film industry started in Washington. An actual one, not where features come to town and shoot second unit for a few days. I would love to get something started here. Hire local crews. People could work year-round and raise their families here.
The cliche is that Washington is a transient town of people who blow in and out every four years with the new administrations. But the reality is that people have lived in Washington for generations, and their lives are worth examining, I think.
'The Turnaround' isn't even really a crime novel. But you need conflict to make a novel, any kind of novel, and I don't know any other way to do it than crime.
My dad used to call me 'the dreamer.' He was right.
If I had my druthers, I wouldn't have anyone's words in my script but my own, but if you want complete autonomy, just stick to novels.
Can't get my head around sci-fi or fantasy. I'm not putting those genres down; it's just that I'm not built for them.
Sometimes there's a reason for the hype.
