“As someone who has researched and written about the Mexican cartels an...” — Don Winslow Quote

As someone who has researched and written about the Mexican cartels and the futile 'war on drugs' for coming on twenty years, I know how tough a subject it is. Mind-bending, soul-warping, heartbreaking, it challenges your intellect, your beliefs, your faith in humanity and God.

The novelist is the vestigial bone on the body cinema. We're like the little toe that can be cut off.

My earliest influence was Shakespeare - I read Shakespeare incessantly as a kid.

When you criminalize something, only criminals can deal with it. When criminals deal with it, there's no recourse to law, so there's only recourse to violence.

Champions invariably have fervent philosophical beliefs. Philosophy, in its simplest terms, means 'the love of wisdom.'

If organized religion has become less relevant, it's not because churches have held fast to their creedal beliefs - it's because they've held fast to their conventional structures, programs, roles and routines.

I'm a Christian, and those beliefs occasionally come out in the books.

My mum's got morals and principles, and I've been brought up with those ideas and beliefs.

It is no coincidence that so many religious beliefs date back to times when no science could possibly have accounted satisfactorily for many of the natural phenomena inspiring scripture and myths.