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

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" 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. "

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

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

" I'm somewhat depressive. "

" I'm an outdoors kind of guy. "

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

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

" 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?' "

" 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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" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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