After I'd been a lawyer for about five or six years, I started playing around with fiction.

So many book sections in newspapers and magazines used to be lively and vibrant places. Now they are gone. You just don't see many reviews anymore. I can't control that, so I don't worry about it. I just try to do what I do and write books that people find every entertaining. I don't worry about the critics.

I'm being followed so much I'm causing traffic jams.

Quite often I can be in a bookshop, standing beneath a great big picture of myself and paying for a book with a credit card clearly marked John Grisham, yet no one recognises me. I often say I'm a famous author in a country where no one reads.

I don't want to force my politics on my readers.

In life, finding a voice is speaking and living the truth. Each of you is an original. Each of you has a distinctive voice. When you find it, your story will be told. You will be heard.

Shame was an emotion he had abandoned years earlier. Addicts know no shame. You disgrace yourself so many times you become immune to it.