Literary Birthday – 22 January – Joseph Wambaugh

Joseph Wambaugh was born 22 January 1937, and died 28 February 2025.

Joseph Wambaugh Quotes

1. 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.
2. The Onion Field made a real writer. And then I knew it was over, I couldn’t be a cop any more.
3. I enjoy doing the research of non-fiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again.
4. 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.
5. Probably 95 percent of the things that are written never get on the screen.

Joseph Wambaugh was a bestselling American writer known for his fictional and non-fictional accounts of police work. One of his best-known books is The Onion Field. He won three Edgar Awards, and was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.

Source for image: Mark Coggins from San Francisco, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wambaugh_(1).jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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