I write pretty much anywhere – on planes, in hotel rooms, anywhere in my house.
I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.
Ideally, I like to integrate the human issues into the suspense story itself.
I’m not your proverbial worst nightmare because nightmares aren’t real and I am more real than anybody wants to admit.
Everything in the past is memory and everything in the future is imagination. Those’re both illusions – memories are unreliable and we just speculate about the future. The only thing that’s completely real is this one instant of the present – and that’s constantly changing from imagination to memory. So, see? Most of our life’s illusory.
Family is about love and affection but about friction and separation, too. Yet, with work and luck, the distances – geographic and emotional – can be shrunk, even made to vanish.
If they were expected,” she shot back, “then they wouldn’t be breakthroughs, now would they?
Curiously, while drone operators are perhaps the safest of all combat troops physically, they have among the highest rates of depression and post-traumatic stress in the military and national security services. Sitting at a video console in Colorado or New York City, killing someone six thousand miles away and then collecting the kids at gymnastics or football practice, having dinner and sitting down to watch Dancing with the Stars in your suburban den was disorienting beyond belief.
The greatest single threat to an investigator is unfamiliarity with his environment.
Love, Colter Shaw had learned, could be an endlessly refillable prescription of madness.
Yield and you need not break. Bent, you can straighten. Emptied, you can hold. Torn, you can mend.
Inspiring isn’t the same as plotting.
You put a certain amount of effort into stitching a jacket or dress and you get the garment you expect. There’s no mystery. But you put a thousand times more effort into raising your child and the result is the opposite of what you hope and dream for. This seemed so unfair.
The creatures I had seen were not men, had never been men. They were animals – humanised animals – triumphs of vivisection.
I’m really not the cold fish everyone thinks I am.
I pressed the ignition button and the engine came to life. Our cars have special mufflers to deaden the exhaust sound but there’s nothing you can do about a starter. Carter.
It’s a tough life, she’d said. “It’s the little things that get us through the day.
But it works that way if it works.
Islands – of times when you’re content, you don’t think about the loss. Now it’s like your world’s underwater. All of it. But the water goes down and the islands come up. The water’ll be there always but you’ll find dry land.
She jotted this down in her ubiquitous notebook.