“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“’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.”
― George Pelecanos
“I don’t judge anyone of any stripe by what they read. Reading is always good for you. It’s a positive act.”
― George Pelecanos
“I shoot occasionally, but I’m no gun expert.”
― George Pelecanos
“I even dream about writing. I’m talking seeing words across the page, whole paragraphs.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“My sons are black, and my daughter is Latina.”
― George Pelecanos
“’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.”
― George Pelecanos
“Sometimes there’s a reason for the hype.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“I like fiction set in the South, and I’m a fan of literary westerns.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“I collect and read as many books about music and film as I do fiction.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“My dad used to call me ‘the dreamer.’ He was right.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“After college, I spent a decade working the kinds of jobs that I write about – bartender, shoe salesman, kitchen man – while voraciously reading novels.”
― George Pelecanos
“Sometimes I think ‘The Wire’ said it all, and I might as well not write any more crime novels.”
― George Pelecanos
“There are a lot of bars and shoe stores in my early books.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“I do miss the Chocolate City of my youth.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“A lot of guys are walking around with a lot simmering beneath the surface, and sometimes it explodes.”
― George Pelecanos
“My books are not for everybody.”
― George Pelecanos
“I was heavily into John D. MacDonald.”
― George Pelecanos
“I never took a writing class.”
― George Pelecanos
“I can’t relax. I don’t have any hobbies.”
― George Pelecanos
“I owned a ’70 Camaro for many years, which I loved.”
― George Pelecanos
“There is nothing like the rumble of a dual-piped American car with something under the hood.”
― George Pelecanos
“For many years, I did ride-alongs with patrol cops, which is any citizen’s right.”
― George Pelecanos
“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?’”
― George Pelecanos
“There’s nothing funny about violence. Death is a real thing.”
― George Pelecanos
“I didn’t want to write the same book over and over.”
― George Pelecanos
“Incarcerated individuals want what most people want in a novel: good, honest writing and a story well told.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“’The Big Sky’ is an American classic.”
― George Pelecanos
“My goal is to get better with each book, and I feel like I am.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“I’m always working on my next novel, even when I’m not.”
― George Pelecanos
“I make a good spaghetti sauce and can mix a nice drink.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― 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.”
― George Pelecanos
“I’ve just been very interested in the living side of Washington, rather than the federal side, since I was a kid.”
― George Pelecanos
“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
“’The Deuce’ came about when David Simon and I were put in contact with a guy who, along with his twin brother, owned a couple bars in Times Square.”
― George Pelecanos
“’The Deuce’ takes a look at the remarkable paradigm of capitalism and labor: where money goes and how it’s routed; who has power and who doesn’t; who is exploited and who’s not.”
― George Pelecanos
“’Treme’ begins after Hurricane Katrina, and it’s a year-by-year account of how everyday people there put their lives back together. It’s sort of a testament to, or an argument for why, a great American city like New Orleans needs to be saved and preserved.”
― George Pelecanos
“I always overtip. When I go to England, people think I’m stupid.”
― George Pelecanos
“I live in a bigger house, but I still live in the neighbourhood I grew up in.”
― George Pelecanos
“Until a book starts forming in your head, you always wonder, ‘Am I going to be able to do this again?’”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“Kids need a father around to make them whole. They need their mom.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“Is there a more violent book than the Bible?”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“I find ‘True Grit’ to be one of the very best American novels: It is a rousing adventure story and deeply perceptive about the makeup of the American character.”
― George Pelecanos
“’True Grit’ is one of the few books my sons let me read to them – and paid attention to – when they were younger.”
― George Pelecanos
“I’m proudly a crime writer, but it would be really inaccurate to call me a mystery writer.”
― George Pelecanos
“I’ve been working in adult prisons and juvenile prisons for some time.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“What we were all always saying with ‘The Wire’ was that there’s a whole group of people that America just sort of wants to throw away. They want to forget about them, and if they could, they’d get rid of them. They are Americans – they’re worth saving; they’re worth helping.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“I’m a very sentimental, emotional person.”
― George Pelecanos
“I’m more apt to shed a tear than my wife about family matters.”
― George Pelecanos
“I never went to a writing school, so ‘The Wire’ was my writing school.”
― George Pelecanos
“I’d get off the set of ‘The Wire’ at 3 A.M. or even 4 A.M. and drive home to Washington to see my kids sleep and give them a kiss. I’d get up at 7 A.M., while the kids were still in bed, and drive back to Baltimore.”
― George Pelecanos
“I’m a fast driver.”
― George Pelecanos
“I go to church for the cultural element. It’s where you go to see Greek people once a week. It’s real important to me, and I hope my children see they’re part of something bigger than just this family.”
― George Pelecanos
“People want to see the world the way they want to see it, not the way it is.”
― George Pelecanos
“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.”
― George Pelecanos
“As far as I’m concerned, the voices of Washington, black Washington, it’s poetry, man. There’s beauty in it.”
― George Pelecanos
“My father’s diner, the Jefferson Coffee Shop, was a simple, 27-seat affair in Washington D.C., open for breakfast and lunch – coffee and eggs in the morning, cold cuts and burgers in the afternoon.”
― George Pelecanos
“Many fathers and sons never get to reconcile their differences or come to an understanding that fills the gap between love and expectations.”
― George Pelecanos
“I’m forever grateful to have had the opportunity to prove myself to my dad. After I took over the diner, the look in my father’s eyes went from disappointment to respect.”
― George Pelecanos
“I was a movie freak before I was a book lover.”
― George Pelecanos
“Movies were the biggest influence on me when I was a kid.”
― George Pelecanos
“I was a child in the ’60s and a teenager in the ’70s, which was the golden age of film as far as I’m concerned, between American film and the Italian reinvention of genre film.”
― George Pelecanos
“I do feel like that’s what a writer does, is he goes into other people’s heads.”
― George Pelecanos
“It’s relatively easy to adopt kids if you’re not trying to get kids that look exactly like you.”
― George Pelecanos
“I love writing books, but it’s a solitary experience. When I’m on a film set, I’m with a bunch of other artists working together to make one thing.”
― George Pelecanos
“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?”
― George Pelecanos
“People like to talk to me. I don’t know why.”
― George Pelecanos
“Reading opens your mind and helps you understand and empathize with people who are unlike you and outside your breadth of experience.”
― George Pelecanos
“I’ve seen firsthand how books can change people’s lives. It happened to me.”
― George Pelecanos
“When I was a kid in the ’60s, I went shopping in downtown Silver Spring. Hecht’s, JCPenney, the little retailers – they sponsored all my sports teams.”
― George Pelecanos
“Where I live, there are a lot of businesses owned by Ethiopians and Eritreans. They’re the new immigrants, the new Greeks – what my people did. The next generation of these people will probably be college graduates. That’s how it works, right there in front of your eyes.”
― George Pelecanos
“I’m a strong believer in second chances.”
― George Pelecanos
“There’s a science to brain development. The brains of teenage boys are crowded with impulse and adrenaline. By the time they hit their 20s, their brains are dominated by conscience and reason.”
― George Pelecanos
“Every day I’m not working or writing is a wasted day to me.”
― George Pelecanos
“I’m intrigued by people who make their modest living doing good things for others. Teachers, nonprofit workers, librarians… those are the heroes in our society.”
― George Pelecanos
“My favorite movies are from the ’70s.”
― George Pelecanos
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