Quotes by Joseph Wambaugh

• You've got people who are looking at DNA evidence and other evidence like that and they're ignoring it.
• When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice.
• When I interview people accused of capital offenses, I never even ask if they did it. I would consider that unprofessional.
• The time has come for professional jurors.
• What is it about the component of fire? People have written about it. People have wondered about it.
• Jury selection is strictly an emotional process. They're looking for people they can manipulate. Both sides are.
• 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'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.
• I hadn't done anything in six years; I was just vegetating.
• I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again.
• I enjoy adapting my own work, or anybody's work. I like to adapt books.
• 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.
• 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 Onion Field, that one got pretty close to me because I was a cop when it happened. I saw some of the indifference that my police department showed to the surviving officer.
• The serial arsonist is the most difficult to apprehend because the evidence is burned up.
• 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.
• Today, lawyers are attacking more; they're attacking everything. A good example is the O.J. Simpson case.
• I certainly believe it's over for the jury system, but we won't admit it for a while.
• As a cop, I dealt with every kind of bum and criminal. They all have more integrity than some Hollywood people.
• Civil servants take forever to do anything.
• Every time I write a nonfiction book I get sued.