Best 21 quotes of Joseph Wambaugh on MyQuotes

Civil servants take forever to do anything.

Every time I write a nonfiction book I get sued.

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

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'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.

It`s corruption never been systemic, because a fish rots from the head

I write a thousand words a day. Nothing will stop me, I mean nothing, until the book is finished. I'm disciplined in spite of myself.

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

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.

Perhaps it had nothing to do with sin and everything to do with sociopathy, that most incurable of human disorders because all so afflicted consider themselves blessed rather than cursed.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Of course, the happy shutterbug couldn't have known that his picture of a dildo keel would soon inspire a plot leading to murder and ensnare human beings like dolphins in a gill net. For he was just a San Diego cop who drove a boat, not a true man of the sea. Not one who understands in his soul that the actions of people are like the tides that chase the moon but invariably come crashing back, with all manner of thrashing things roiling in their foamy wake.