American cops didn't create that atmosphere, they're the ones though who have to live with it on a daily basis. These are generalisations; you can't make generalisations about hundreds of thousands of people. The New York Police Department, for instance, has 38,000 police officers in it. But most cops, when I talk to them, desperately care about the victims of gun violence. They see it, they experience it.

I have to remind the people who put down East Coast surfing that Kelly Slater is from Florida.

It's important to me that the reader goes on a ride with the characters, that you set context enough to know, "Okay, here's where we are in the world. Now we're just going to go inside this person's head, this guy's heart, this woman's ambitions and take it down to very, very small scale."

I think one of the problems with being a fiction writer these days is that you can't keep up with the headlines. Things that people would say are absurd occur the next day or they come out of somebody's mouth. There are days I just wanna give up.

You watch Jeff Sessions testifying in front of Congress, Jesus, like watching an amnesiac: "I don't recall," "I don't remember," "I don't recall," "I don't remember," "I don't remember what I don't recall," "I recall what I don't remember." Amazing.

I try to pay attention to language. I think that as a general rule, we as writers talk too much and we should listen more. I read my dialogue out loud to myself because I think that's when you catch the wrong notes and the wrong tones.

The Americans take a product that literally grows on trees and turn it into a valuable commodity. Without them, cocaine and marijuana would be like oranges, and instead of making billions smuggling it, I’d be making pennies doing stoop labor in some California field, picking it.