Zitat des Tages von Robert Crais:
The relationship between a military working dog and a military dog handler is about as close as a man and a dog can become. You see this loyalty, the devotion, unlike any other and the protectiveness.
There's the Hollywood sign; there's Griffith Observatory; there's the great, amazing Los Angeles Basin. It's 465 square miles of insanity and the best food on the planet.
I began to encounter real-life stories of dogs protecting their wounded or dying or dead handler... or dogs refusing to leave the bodies of the people they were bonded to, sitting in cemeteries for days or sometimes weeks. You find these stories endlessly.
My family was all police and hard hats at the refineries; they didn't know what to think about me. So I became a closet writer.
If my vision was good enough, I'd be an astronaut.
Dogs give us something just as we give something to them.
At Lackland Air Force Base, they make an effort to retrain military dogs that suffer from PTSD. It's a lengthy, long process. The treatment is much the same as it would be for people, but it's a difficult road back.
First and foremost I am a commercial writer, and I hope to entertain people. But having said that, I'm in love with the relationship between humans and dogs, and the more I learned about what our military working dogs are doing, I wanted to at least share with people what an important role these animals have in all our lives.
My fiction is almost always inspired by a character's need or desire to rise above him- or herself. No one is perfect and some of us have much adversity in our lives; it is those people who struggle to rise above their nature or background that I find the most interesting and heroic.
Sometimes I am so dry that people don't know I'm kidding and think I'm being serious. I enjoy this because their reactions are often funny.
My books come to me in images, and sometimes the image is at the beginning of the book, and sometimes it's simply a flash somewhere in the middle.
I have this horrible weakness. I fall in love with my characters. 'Suspect' started as a one-shot, but I just love Maggie so much, and I love Maggie and Scott and what they have going.
Everything we are is anchored in our childhoods. The drama comes in how we deal with it. Are we slaves to our past, or can we rise above it? This is the stuff of great stories.
I write characters and stories that move me, and I write from the heart.
I tried to reject everything I knew as a TV writer when I decided to be a novelist, and the books didn't work. Finally I realized I should go back to all the techniques I'd learned.
I had a big Akita, Yoshi, who was fabulous. I loved him. We lost him when he was 12, and I've never been able to replace him. Normally, most people lose a pet and get another and keep going on. But it just felt wrong to me; it felt disloyal.
When dogs fulfill their roles they are ecstatically happy.
I love the fact that you collaborate with your readers when you write a book.
I love, love writing about Los Angeles. I love exploring every part of it. And I find, rather than a burden, it's actually one of the most enjoyable parts of the writing process for me. I love everything about L.A. Okay, not the traffic. But I love the way it looks. I love the geography. I love the diversity.
I have these huge black foam boards on the wall, and tacked to them, I have these white punch cards with my story ideas, scenes and notes.
L.A.'s magic has let me see every level of the dream.
What they smell isn't the emotion of fear. What dogs can smell is the changes in a person's skin that suggest fear to the dog, anxiety, the way your skin sweats, the amount of uric acid that suddenly pours out of your pores.
