“The best research gets your fingers dusty and your shoes dirty, especially because a novel is made of details. I had to translate places through my senses into the senses of my readers. I had to know what a place smelled like, what it sounded like when it rained in Mexico City. There’s no substitute for that. I’ve been steeped in evidence-based truth.”

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“A career is built one paragraph at a time. I wrote six books and a blue-million articles before anything of mine hit the bestseller lists. I don’t know any shortcuts. But if you’re really a writer, that’s no problem, because you’d rather be writing than anything else.”

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