My kids are incredibly secure. More and more of their friends' parents are divorcing, but my kids have absolute confidence that we'll stay together forever. That goes a long, long way.

Courage is impulsive; it is narcissism tempered with nihilism.

Whatever my intentions, whatever the truth of my claim, I had no business giving a lecture to a total stranger.

When you consider America, there are hundreds of millions of people who have smoked marijuana illegally.

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

Being a public defender makes you incredibly paranoid - and I would say with reason - about law enforcement.

I'd never written nonfiction about the war on drugs, but I know a tremendous amount about it: I taught a class on it for seven years. I was putting into words the stuff I was teaching, and I was writing it up and thought, "Dude, you're writing a book."