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

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

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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

Law Enforcement

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

" 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?' "

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

" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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

" I really do need the help of other people working with me. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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