Literary Birthday – 21 July – Michael Connelly

Happy Birthday, Michael Connelly, born 21 July 1956.

Michael Connelly Quotes

1. You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more.
2. Keep your head down. In other words, keep it in the story. Don’t look up at what is going on in publishing. Forget the trends or what stories are the focus of hot deals, etc. Just write your story, the one you know that you would like to read.
3. I’m a disciple of Raymond Chandler, who said in his essays that there’s a quality of redemption in anything that can be called art.
4. I think there’s a general misconception that anything written quickly lacks quality, and I don’t believe that.
5. That’s the irony in the work: the best stories are the worst things that happen. My best times were somebody else’s worst.
6. I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.
7. I went into journalism to learn the craft of writing and to get close to the world I wanted to write about – police and criminals, the criminal justice system.
8. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.
9. I work in the mornings. In the afternoon I take care of busy work. Then I like to work again at night. On the weekends I try to work a little bit in the morning, then take the rest of the day off.
10. Write every day even if it is just a paragraph.

Michael Connelly is an American author of crime fiction, which is sometimes described as procedural hardboiled. He is most famous for his novels featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus ‘Harry’ Bosch. He won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1992 for The Black Echo. The latest in the series is Desert Star. Other recent titles include The Dark Hours, The Night Fire, Dark Sacred Night, and Two Kinds of Truth. With over 90 million copies of his books sold and translated into 45 languages, he is one of the world’s most successful writers. he has written 42 novels and one work of non-fiction. He was the President of the Mystery Writers of America from 2003 to 2004. He is the executive producer of Bosch, and Bosch: Legacy, and Ballard, three Amazon Studios original drama series based on his bestselling characters, Harry Bosch and Renée Ballard. He is the executive producer of The Lincoln Lawyer on Netflix, which features his character, Mickey Haller. Connelly’s crime fiction career was honoured with the Diamond Dagger from the CWA in 2018, and the Outstanding Contribution To Crime Writing Award at the 2022 Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England, and the Grand Master title from the Mystery Writers of America in 2023. His latest novel is The Proving Ground.

Read my 2006 interview with Michael Connelly here: Michael Connelly Answers 17 Questions

Source for Image: Author’s Press Room, Photo Credit Mark DeLong

by Amanda Patterson

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