Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court.

It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.

Discovery is the joy.

My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.

We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings. If as a writer, you want to capture the world we live in, I think you have some responsibility to at least try to get at some of the ways we've chosen to govern ourselves.

Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court.

You have to expose part of yourself to create a character deep enough for readers to care about. You try not to because it's hard and at times shameful, but then when you read those pages over and you see they have no life to them so you throw them away and force yourself to be more honest. So I suppose the answer is I see myself in all my characters, in their best moments and in their worst.