I'm very disturbed by violence against women when it is violence.

That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.

It's disturbing at my age to look at a young woman's destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one's own destructiveness in youth.

The only thing that I was equipped for with my very mediocre college Arts degree was to get a job in teaching.

Now, I - for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at their decisions.

People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.

I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly - my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I'm left out.