Being a journalist always makes you a quick study of wherever you're at. You're out all the time and seeing places that normally you wouldn't get to see. It gives you an unusual level of insight into any place.

It's about being fair. It's about Black Lives Matter. Yes, they matter. Everybody counts or nobody counts, and I think if more cops had the philosophy of Harry Bosch, we'd have less of these situations happening.

With age comes a greater understanding and a greater worldview.

My entire career writing novels was wrapped up around Harry Bosch. This character was too important to me to just hand off.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

While teaching a course on global development at Uppsala University in Sweden, I realized our students didn't have a fact-based worldview. They talked about 'we' and 'them.' They thought there were two groups of countries: the Western world, with small families and long lives, and the Third World, with large families and short lives.

Because I came from a small town outside Glasgow, nobody from my school had ever gone into the acting profession. It was just something you didn't do. You joined the bank or became a teacher or whatever you did.

Even when I was on the football pitch as a teenager, I wanted to be the teacher.