Guy Ritchie Quotes

Crime stories show us the part of people's lives they try to keep hidden.

Crime stories are, as you know, one of the most popular forms of entertainment that exist. If you then try to have something to say... that I have, of course.

The Italian gangster thing has become a form of the modern-day Western.

We haven't had crime writers, and for a long time in the Republic, we didn't seem to have a crime problem as such.

Of course, I write crime stories, and I have to describe violence and the aftermath of violence.

I never write about CIA conspiracies or the FBI or mafia or anything like that because I just don't understand that world. But I think I do understand individual human harmfulness.

I think if you look back at some of the stuff that we broadly label as the crime 'ouvre,' there are certainly elements of the supernatural at work.

Nothing about Tony Soprano's life was glamorous. He was never somebody I wanted to be. His life was terrible.

People love stories about the mafia: 'The Godfather,' 'American Gangster.'

The stories I read or get attracted to have a kind of thrill element, or a crime.

Wambaugh's naturalistic portrait of the cop world turned 'Centurions' and 'The Blue Knight' (1972) into bestsellers, but his next two books made him relevant to a larger audience and to the next generation of crime writers.

The British were doing crime stories first, but the British thing is a very different thing. There, the stories are about restoring a break in the fabric of society. The American thing has never been worrying about breaks in the fabric of society, but about people doing their job, whether it's police procedurals or criminals or whatever.

Crime fiction is a genre for writing stories about people - about conflict, about guilt, about passion, about the human condition.

[Dennis] Etchison would write stories that were just punch lines at the end. You wouldn't realize something horrific was happening until the last paragraph.

Lagos was a city that had been turned against itself. There was a bridge that became the perfect trap for crimes, which began with nails being scattered to cause flat tyres. If the driver stopped, the car would be dismantled in 20 minutes and the parts thrown overboard [to people waiting below]. The system had turned into a kind of destructive device that could be used against people. That was the narrative.

I imagine that in a closed, hermetic society like the mob, where everybody knows each other, it must be really, really unpleasant to have to kill people. It's the sort of thing you really want to avoid.

International relations bears more than a slight resemblance to the mafia.

Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe.

There is Throats to be cut, and Works to be done.

When you get to political machines that can control a state, then you're really into organized crime - almost. You're fighting a political mafia.

If Elmore Leonard met Jim Thompson down a dark alley at midnight they might emerge a week later with thick beards, bloodshot eyes and the manuscript for THE BIG O.

I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions. l might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three city districts. The Marines operated on three continents.

The crime film is the most honest American film.

Murder, arson, adultery, drugging and drinking, cruel politics--reading a book crammed with such activities can make the timid and yearning among us feel like the happiest people in the world.