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" 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. "

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" 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?' "

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

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

" 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. "

" These characters are not spontaneous creations. They are engineered down to the last nut and bolt. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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'm an outdoors kind of guy. "

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" You have the feeling that if you get a Pulitzer, you're somehow set for life. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "