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

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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Before the Internet became so powerful, I toured extensively. With the rise of the Internet, touring apparently has become less important. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I've always had a fascination with the technical and small-scale aspects of life - the national media seem to have more interest in the sweeping political views. "

" If you do outline, you have to be aware of the problems that that kind of thing can cause. "

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

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

" If readers tell you that stretches of dialogue or narrative were too long, that they couldn't tell who was talking, that's something that can be fixed. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" I've always thought of myself as a journalist; that was what I did. "

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

" 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. "

" I'm an outdoors kind of guy. "

" 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. "