The coffee arrives, and we backslide into what lawyers do best---talking about other lawyers.

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

Ten years from now I plan to be sitting here, looking out over my land. I hope I'll be writing books, but if not, I'll be on my pond fishing with my kids. I feel like the luckiest guy I know.

There is no devious and dangerous life. I've lived a charmed life, especially in the last thirty years since I've started publishing. I've won the lottery. And I keep winning it every year and I am so fortunate to do something I thoroughly enjoy and still enjoy after a bunch of books.

We learned after the first semester in law school that it's best never to discuss exams. If notes are compared afterwards, you become painfully aware of things you missed.

I don't even know what a serious literary critic is.

And that's the mission of The Innocence Project in New York, is to exonerate people who have been wrongfully convicted, and also work from a policy angle with Congress and state legislatures to prevent future wrongful convictions.