The strange thing was, he wanted to like everyone. He just couldn't find a way to do it.

What some people interpret as brooding melancholy is serenity. I don't feel required to grasp all the time.

I was aware that there is an expectation that writers inevitably falter at this stage, that they fail to live up to the promise of their first successful book, that the next book never pleases the way the prior one did. It simply increased my sense of being challenged.

Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it.

I often heard about his cases and I often sat in on his trials. In the late 1960s when I was growing up I wanted to be a crusader like him but I didn't want to wear a suit and commute.

There's a certain nostalgia and romance in a place you left.

Fiction is socially meaningful.