I can't change overnight into a serious literary author. You can't compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.

The good thing about writing fiction is that you can get back at people.

And they drank heavily, partied with great enthusiasm, and relished the drug culture; they moved in and out and slept around, and this was okay because they defined their own morality. They were fighting for the Mexicans and the redwoods, dammit! They had to be good people!

One thing that drives me nuts... well, let me ask you, when writers write do they not use quotation marks anymore?

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.

There's always such a rush to judgment. It makes a fair trial hard to get.

I earned my first steady paycheck watering rose bushes at a nursery for a dollar an hour.