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

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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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" I'm somewhat depressive. "

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

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" 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. "

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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. "

" 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?' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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