Joseph Wambaugh Quotes

24 quotes in 296 categories

• It`s corruption never been systemic, because a fish rots from the head
• The Onion Field, that one got pretty close to me because I was a cop when it happened. I saw some of the indifference that…
• Jury selection is strictly an emotional process. They're looking for people they can manipulate. Both sides are.
• What is it about the component of fire? People have written about it. People have wondered about it.
• Every time I write a nonfiction book I get sued.
• I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again.
• I hadn't done anything in six years; I was just vegetating.
• I certainly believe it's over for the jury system, but we won't admit it for a while.
• 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…
• 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…
• Civil servants take forever to do anything.
• I enjoy adapting my own work, or anybody's work. I like to adapt books.
• When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice.
• The O.J. Simpson case, they had no understanding of that DNA evidence, and didn't want to.
• 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…
• Probably 95 percent of the things that are written never get on the screen.
• 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.
• The time has come for professional jurors.
• Today, lawyers are attacking more; they're attacking everything. A good example is the O.J. Simpson case.

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