Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. I enjoyed everything about it so much that one or two weeks later I'd be out looking for the next job. But to me the money was the chips, that's all.
Crime is to the passions what nervous fluid is to life: it sustains them, it supplies their strength.
A working detective has no hope of understanding what even experts who devote their lives to the study of criminal psychology can't figure out.
Criminals interest me, because they're driven by the same desires as we are, but they take these disastrous shortcuts and end up in a real mess.
The true criminal must be defined as a man who commits a crime though he is as decently fed and clothed as others.
Our criminal institutions are full of creeps like you who do wrong things, and many of them were driven to these crimes by the horrible force called music.
I was in handcuffs. I was under arrest. I remember there was this old lady looking at me, and I could tell she felt real sorry for me, and she did'nt know but all I wanted to do was take her purse.
The number one cause of crime is criminals.
Anyone in England who puts himself forward to be elected to a position of political power is almost bound to be socially or emotionally insecure, or criminally motivated, or mad.
Crimes spring from fixed ideas.
When trying a case [the famous judge] L. Cassius never failed to inquire "Who gained by it?" Man's character is such that no one undertakes crimes without hope of gain.
National criminal behavior is always defined by the perpetrator’s compulsion to forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the first line of defense. If that fails, the perpetrator’s attacks on the credibility of the victims.
I'm interested in people who are very close to the people who commit crimes.
No one wakes up one day and decides they want to become a drug dealer or they want to be a stick-up kid. Those decisions are made after a series of events have happened in one's life.
The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the bigger the crime, the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive.
Jim Thompson understood something about the serial killer before the psychology caught up to it, which is that they are detached to it and they do want to get caught.
You must remember that the common criminal will always join the armed forces for, if nothing else, regular meals and expert training in the use of guns.
My chance, when it came, was due, literally, to the fact that I was slender.... You cannot make an opera audience believe that a man will endanger his soul, and commit robbery and murder for a very stout lady's sake.
My approach to the story... is if you can get into a criminal's mind and understand how it works and understand how crime is committed, you can help prevent it from happening to someone else.
I love the idea of getting into the mind of the criminal.
Where would heist movies be without the Big Score - that payoff so irresistible it can lure the most jaded desperado out of hiding?
I did a lot of research on real serial killers, and they're not Hannibal Lecters. They're cruel men who are given the opportunity to do something terrible, and a lot of the time it's about impotence. They feel powerless in the real world.
Noir focuses on the criminal mind, not a whodunit: more why they did it and will they get away with it. The abnormal psychology is what fascinates me rather than the puzzle-solving aspect.
