David Baldacci

The best books that I ever read, it wasn't just that they were fun.

It was like when I walked away from them, I felt changed internally.

And I started thinking about things otherwise I never would have focused on at all.

Humans do that.

It changes who they are because you carry forward their perspective throughout the rest of your life.

You look at the world differently and that's what really good books do.

When I write books, I try to examine the humans in it.

It's not just an action story.

I want you to dig down and what drives people to do stuff like this, whether it's good or bad or in between.

And guess what?

Good people do bad things and bad people occasionally do good things.

So that's what's so complicated about the world.

I want people to get off their phones and actually look life again.

I want people to relate to people and try to understand them and not stare at things on the screen because we're missing so much in life.

The older I get, the more books I write, and the way the world is these days, my message in these books is, let's go back to being human beings again.

And if I can help you do that by showing that human beings are really, really complicated, they're really, really fun just to take apart and see what makes them tick, it's a better way to spend your time than doing scrolling.

I think all told with my young adult stuff, it's like 60 books, but I didn't, I stopped counting a while ago.

Long time ago.

Yeah, so I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, the old capital of the Confederacy.

And when I was born, segregation was still legal.