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My dad believed in scaring us as we were growing up. Scaring the boys who wanted to date us more.
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As a writer, I've always felt it's my job to be extremely careful when writing about victims, especially women.
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I've always been interested in violence, even as a teenager. I loved 'Helter Skelter' and books like that.
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I want to be a better writer. I want to learn and grow, to know how to tell stories in a different and more challenging way. I've learned it doesn't get easier each time. It actually gets harder.
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I read a lot of true crime growing up – 'The Stranger Beside Me' by Ann Rule about Ted Bundy.
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Readers are very, very savvy, and I don't want to insult them by making them think I'm too lazy to get it right.
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I think a lot of guys who are on the Internet a lot, they're kind of anesthetized to some of the violent language and all that because they see it all the time.
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Flannery O'Connor was a revelation for me. When I read her, I was very young, and I didn't understand what she was doing. I didn't see any of the Catholicism or any of the social stuff.
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Good writers know that crime is an entre into telling a greater story about character. Good crime writing holds up a mirror to the readers and reflects in a darker light the world in which they live.
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My sister lived in England for a while when I was 12, and I came to visit her, and I spent most of the time in her flat reading.
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Even if you live in a big city, everybody lives in a small town. We identify ourselves by our neighborhoods - 'I live in the Village, or in Chelsea.'
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Most of my books begin with a nap on my couch here, when I dream up characters and story lines, and then I write on my laptop in the recliner and handle the business side of email at my desk, which is sagging in the middle - maybe from so many words?
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In the South, we drink the Bible with our mother's milk.
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No matter where you are on the political spectrum, libraries make sense. It's such a small investment. Every dollar supporting a library system returns five dollars to the community.
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Usually, when inspiration strikes late, the light of day reveals that I haven't gotten an idea for a book so much as a psychiatric case study.
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Reading is exercise for our brains in the guise of pleasure. Books give us insight into other people, other cultures. They make us laugh. They make us think. If they are really good, they make us believe that we are better for having read them.
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Like every Southern writer, I thought that I needed to write the next 'Gone With the Wind.'
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The familiar trope of the woman in peril doesn't really interest me.
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I didn't want to spend the next thirty years writing about bad things happening in the same small town - not least of all because people would begin to wonder why anyone still lives there!
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I have a superhero complex. If I see anything bad happen, I run towards it, rather idiotically because, after all, what could I do?
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It's a very Southern thing to be interested in dark stuff.
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I write fifteen hours a day, stopping at Oprah-o'clock.
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I have a few unusual fans, as you can imagine, so I try to protect the privacy of my home life.
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I'm really boring. I get up early. I go to bed early. I don't smoke or drink. I mean, I'll eat a cupcake. I'm just not a crazy, stay-out-all-night sort of person. I love writing.