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" 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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" 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. "

" 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?' "

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

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

Law Enforcement

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" When I was reporting crime... I never had the sense of clockwork conspiracies or some kind of imposing order of evil. What I sensed was things just sort of falling apart. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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 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'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. "

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

" 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. "

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