Benson is a champion. I'd be lying to you if I said I wasn't scared to death inside this cage, stepping into the cage with that monster.

My goal is to win and to finish fights quickly.

You don't hope to go up and hit a single. You go up and hope to hit a home run.

I talk to my god every day and he's completely fine with me beating the hell out of people.

I'm a nasty human being when I step into that cage, but before that I could care less.

I got a wife and a son I have to fight for.

I just turned 34 and feel like the best striker I've ever been.

It's damage to a nerve. It pretty much shut down the whole lower part of my left leg. I wasn't able to step anymore. It's called foot drop - basically, you can't lift your foot.

There are always a couple of ways you envision fights going; you always envision a win and a great finish.

Obviously, as a young, young, hungry fighter, I'd like to be fighting three or four times a year.

I don't focus on how I'm gonna get the finish or how I would like to get the finish. I focus on just my game plan that I've gone over with myself, my coaches. If the finish comes it comes.

I've had the belt and it's great. But at the end of the day it's just 12 pounds of leather and gold.

You got to surround yourself with the strongest in the world, the strongest training partners and the best people. That's what I do.

When I first started fighting, it was just me. But things changed when I married, knowing that I had another person counting on me.

The people who know me, the fans who've watched my fights, they know what I'm about. They know that I'm going to give 100 percent of everything I have each and every time I get into the octagon.

Some guys, when they enjoy some success in this sport, they get complacent. Not me. It makes me work and train that much harder, helps to bring out the warrior in me.

I didn't even drink in college.

If it's an emotional chick-flick type of movie, chances are, I'm going to end up crying. I'm not afraid to admit that, because I think emotion is very healthy.

Once I'm in training camp, there's no beer, there's no soda, there's no bad food. There's no anything. It's eat, sleep and breathe training.

Benson Henderson is a professional; he's a champion. He knows how to handle himself in the cage and he knows how to win fights.

Growing up as a wrestler, especially in practice, I think you get used to competing without much of a crowd around.

The belt will grow dust and sit on the mantelpiece, but it's not about the belt. It's about how I can be as a father, as a human being that matters to me.

I think overall body awareness and knowing exactly where I need to be makes a big difference. Knowing how much weight to put on each foot or where I need to put my hands are things I'm very good at. Obviously with the wrestling background those are things that come naturally.

I was never an upper body wrestler. I am a shooter.

A newspaper is the center of a community, it's one of the tent poles of the community, and that's not going to be replaced by Web sites and blogs.

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.

People like the Bosch books because they like Harry Bosch, not because the plots are fantastic.

I don't miss being a reporter as a job, but I do miss the everyday interaction with the front line of law enforcement. I still have a cadre of cops who keep me up to date, but I don't have the access I used to.

I can't say I'm an expert on public transport.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.

My experience as a newspaper reporter was invaluable in terms of getting me to the kind of writing I do now. It gave me a work ethic of writing every day and pushing through difficult creative times. I mean, there's no writer's block allowed in a newsroom.

When I was a teenager, I was a voracious reader of crime fiction, but only contemporary books. I was not interested in reading 'The Glass Key' or 'The Maltese Falcon' - stuff that was 40 or 50 years old.

There is a prevailing school of thought that something good must take time, sometimes years to create and hone. I have always felt that the books I have written fastest have been my best - because I caught an unstoppable momentum in the writing.

When I write about Mickey Haller as the Lincoln lawyer, I totally see Matthew McConaughey because he took that character when that character was still fairly new to me - only two or three years old - when I knew McConaughey was going to play him. He's also the same age, the right age, in comparison to the book.

My father was a builder. During my high school years, I worked for him. One summer, I was working with a guy who had just come back from Vietnam and had been a tunnel rat. He wouldn't talk about the experience, but it sounded really scary to me.

I'm a disciple of Raymond Chandler, who said in his essays that there's a quality of redemption in anything that can be called art.

I get up to write while it's still dark, 5 or 5:30. I start by editing and rewriting everything I did the day before, and that gives some momentum for the day.

I connect to the tradition of Irish storytelling. And I think there is something - I can't put my finger on it - something genetic there. Maybe just a need to tell stories.

With age comes a greater understanding and a greater worldview.

I'm going to have to be impressed and feel confident in the people I'm handing a book to - or I'm not going to do it. Once you hand it to them, you're out. You have no control over it.

Write every day even if it is just a paragraph.

A good day to me is writing from 6 A.M. 'til noon with a break to take my daughter to school. After lunch, if I still feel the momentum, I'll hit it again.

The books I've written the fastest were the best reviewed and sold the best.

I went into journalism to learn the craft of writing and to get close to the world I wanted to write about - police and criminals, the criminal justice system.

I chose deliberately for Harry Bosch to age chronologically with the books.

Deep in my heart it still feels like I'm a journalist even though I haven't worked for a paper and carried a press pass for 14 years.

I think there has to be an empathic strike between the reader and the protagonist. There has to be something said or known that connects the reader to this person you're going to ride through the story with.

When I was in college, there were dollar movie nights. I went to see 'The Long Goodbye,' which was based on one of Chandler's books but was contemporary and set in Los Angeles in 1973. I loved the movie, which motivated me to read the book.

I hate people thinking their city is unique, but there is a certain aura about Los Angeles; it's not necessarily a beautiful thing, but it's part of Harry Bosch.

This next to never happens, but if I had time to sit on a beach and read, I wouldn't read a cozy. But I've read cozies. That's how I got interested in crime fiction: because my mother was a soft-boiled reader.