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

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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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" I'm somewhat depressive. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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