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

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

" 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'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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

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

" 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 like a little sex in their novels. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm an outdoors kind of guy. "

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

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

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

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