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

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

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

" 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. "

" Virgil Flowers fishes in the St. Croix where I fish for muskies near my house. "

" 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. "

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

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

Law Enforcement

" There are two worldviews in thriller writing: the paranoid view, like Chuck Logan's, that everything is inside a large clockwork. I like those books; they're intricate and thought out, but my view is that everything is chaotic and stupid. Chaos reigns, and civilized people do what they can to hold it back. "

" I spend a lot of time wandering around the countryside just looking at people, seeing how everything fits together. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I'm just trying to normalize my life and get ready for the last 20 years or whatever I've got. It's a lot to take care of. "

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

" They don't have a lot of crime in the countryside other than theft. But every once in a while, things turn ugly, and when they turn ugly, they turn very ugly. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Working for the 'Miami Herald' in 1972, I covered street action for both the Republican and Democratic national conventions in Miami and saw probably the most violent conventions ever - more violent than even 1968 in Chicago. "

" Combat stress isn't the only problem for soldiers isolated in Iraq - there are family issues, re-integration issues when soldiers go home on leave, loneliness. "

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

" A lot of journalists are talented enough to write a mystery novel, and I would say that most of the top-end mystery writers actually started out as reporters. But there is more to it than just the writing; there's a learning process, and most journalists aren't willing to do it. "

" I'm an outdoors kind of guy. "

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

" 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?' "

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

" I'm somewhat depressive. "

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