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" If I don't write, I hate myself. Simple as that. My life is out of balance. "

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" We're called New Jersey but we're actually the suburbs of New York. "

" I live in the suburbs, the final battleground of the American dream, where people get married and have kids and try to scratch out a happy life for themselves. "

" In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury. "

" The state of New Jersey is really two places - terrible cities and wonderful suburbs. I live in the suburbs, the final battleground of the American dream, where people get married and have kids and try to scratch out a happy life for themselves. It's very romantic in that way, but a bit naive. I like to play with that in my work. "

" No characters in 'Stay Close,' including the leads, are black and white. I want them to be grey. I think that makes for a much more interesting reading experience, something that will stay with you a little bit longer. "

Black And White

" I'd never had money growing up, and it's never been that important to me, except maybe to take our kids on a nice vacation or something like that. "

" I once worked as a tour guide in the Costa del Sol of Spain. "

" The muse is not an angelic voice that sits on your shoulder and sings sweetly. The muse is the most annoying whine. The muse isn't hard to find, just hard to like - she follows you everywhere, tapping you on the shoulder, demanding that you stop doing whatever else you might be doing and pay attention to her. "

" Let me back up a little and tell you why I prefer writing to real life: You can rewrite. A novel, for example, can be cleaned up, altered, trimmed, improved. Life, on the other hand, is one big messy rough draft. "

" Life may not always fall into neat chapters, and you may not always get the satisfying ending you're looking for, but sometimes a good explanation is all the rewrite you need. "

" Make no mistake, adolescence is a war. No one gets out unscathed. "

" I am, after all, a thriller writer. I routinely delve into the darkest chambers of the human heart. I've written about murder, kidnapping, depravity, horror, violence, and disfigurement. "

" Writing my first book, I think in hindsight I went into it saying, 'It's gonna sell.' I was earning enough to scrape by sometime around a book or two before 'Tell No One.' I moved up from $50,000 to $75,000, then $150,000 for each book. I had never thought I would be doing anything else. I had enough encouragement. "

" This is the price you pay for having a great father. You get the wonder, the joy, the tender moments - and you get the tears at the end, too. "

" There are three things that make a person a writer: inspiration, perspiration and desperation. "

" More than once, I've wished my real life had a delete key. "

" I don't find any real rivalries with crime and thriller writers anyway. That might sound a little Pollyanna, but for the most part the writers I compete with, if you want to use that word, it's a pretty friendly rivalry. I think we all realise that the boat rises and sinks together. "

" I wrote seven Myron Bolitar novels in a row, and I never want to write a Myron book where he just solves a crime. Every one of them I want to be personal, and I want him to grow and change. The problem with that is, it makes the series limited, you can't write a series where a guy is always going through some kind of crisis. "

" Frankly I'm fairly boring or fairly busy. Between writing and family, I have little time for anything else. "

" Children learn much more from how you act than from what you tell them. There are times this worries me - we parents are rarely the role models we want to be. True for life. True for driving. "

" Sometimes even when the book is over I don't know who's good and who's bad. It's really more interesting, I think, to write about gray characters than it is to write about black and white. "

" I remember the days of sitting at book signings, playing with my pen when no one would come, and still I even then thought I was living the dream, because I had a book out. "

" In short, the satisfaction of creating, not necessarily the process, always lifts my heart. "

" I am very lucky that I get to tell stories for a living. I love being able to grab people's attention, to keep them turning the pages, to make them stay awake all night. I want to stir the pulse, yes, but also to stir the heart. I hope 'The Woods' does that. "

" I like to go out and write. So I'll often go to a Starbucks or a local coffee bar, and I'll sit there and I'll write. I can write pretty much anywhere. "

" A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made. "

" I'm not a fan of self-help books - how can something be 'self-help' if the book itself is purportedly helping you? "

" Writing isn't about the process. It is about creating. The joy comes not from the process but from the creation. "

" Losing my parents was the most crushing thing that ever happened to me. I lost my dad when I was 26, and it changed my life entirely. "

" I like to see the difference between good and evil as kind of like the foul line at a baseball game. It's very thin, it's made of something very flimsy like lime, and if you cross it, it really starts to blur where fair becomes foul and foul becomes fair. "