I tend to write in the mornings. |
I then became a defense lawyer and saw the system go wrong, saw innocent people convicted and sentenced to death, and people who were certainly guilty, but who had not committed crimes as grave as the punishment. |
I think the first serious novel that interested me was The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. |
I trained as a writer before I became a lawyer. |
I was headed for a life as an English professor but that just wasn't me. |
I'm not a scholar, I didn't have a scholar's attitude toward literature. |
If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction. |
In each of my books a character begins to take over. |
In the broadest terms it is, like much literature, about life and death. |
In the wake of the Sixties they began to celebrate diversity and pluralism. |
It turned out people were intensely curious about what actually goes on in courtrooms, and that Americans were deeply interested in law. |
It's all words, that's all the law is, |
It's the inability of the laws and institutions to accommodate these fine differences in people that has always provided a theme for me. |
Just because it's a mystery, it doesn't have to be mindless. |
Like most American boys of my age I read a lot of Ian Fleming. |