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

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" 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. "

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

Law Enforcement

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I'm somewhat depressive. "

" There's something about marriage that is not as intensely romantic or interesting as a couple's first meeting. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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