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" A lot of cops in fiction are very depressive and are kind of downbeat, and they've got all kinds of existential angst that they're dealing with. "

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" I was a newspaper editor in the Army, and I know something about the Army PR culture. "

" When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?' "

" When you're writing two books a year, you really need some time off and don't want to use that down time for touring. I do like talking with readers, though; they can tell you important stuff. "

" Well, I am becoming doddering and old but I have - I'm writing two books a year now. It's like 220,000 words or something like finished, and, honest to God, I can't do that. I really do need the help of, you know, other people working with me. "

" I really do need the help of other people working with me. "

" When I was reporting crime... I never had the sense of clockwork conspiracies or some kind of imposing order of evil. What I sensed was things just sort of falling apart. "

" I've always been sort of interested in the rural countryside. Things happen out there that are very strange to city dwellers. "

" I fear becoming formulaic. Some of my books are. "

" With most of my books, I'll actually go out and look at the setting. If you describe things carefully, it kind of makes the scene pop. "

" Most people who are trying to write kind of sit in their basements and pull it out of their imaginations. "

" Women just make interesting characters, especially when you're working against cliches. "

" As a journalist, I interviewed people, and you begin to feel different rhythms in speech, and you can use those things to help carve out a character. "

" There's something about marriage that is not as intensely romantic or interesting as a couple's first meeting. "

" I'm an outdoors kind of guy. "

" A lot of my friends were retiring from the newspaper business, and the newspaper pensions are not enormous. "

" Things fall apart and happen out of stupidity and carelessness. "

" I have a problem with the way the media deals with a lot of law enforcement issues. "

Law Enforcement

" That's my sense of how crime works: that it's not any kind of calculated evil driven by the devil, but just control disintegrating. "

" It's interesting how people are sensitive to language and how it works. "

" People ought to be slapped up side of the head, not always get what they expect. That's why sometimes the bad guy gets away. "

" Most people like a little sex in their novels. "

" Most people in protest mobs are pretty sincere and don't want to fight cops or break things. "

" If you actually hang out in the countryside, which I did, it's actually quite peaceful. "

" Books set in Brooklyn and L.A. are often about people who are rootless, who want to go somewhere else. In the Midwest, though, the stories are about people who want to stay where they are - who like where they are. "

" The difference is this: If you write a good book, it'll get published. If you have a great screenplay, there is no guarantee. "

" I once paddled a canoe the length of the Mississippi River all the way from Itasca to New Orleans. "

" I'm not saying that photographers are dumber than other people, but they are the folks who walk around with brilliant white lights in nighttime riots. "

" People in California don't live in a place so much as they do a condition. "

" My kids, who are grown now and living in L.A., are used to me packing up and taking off to somewhere weird. "

" Just go outside and look at something and write it down and you'll find it is a very nice piece of writing. "