I'm not 'Mr. No-By-The-Book.' I just want to make sure the character is by the book.

I realize now I could have gotten a whole book out of that and so I think that was a big mistake. But the truth is you write in the moment and with your head down and there is no way back then that I could have conceived of Harry having the longevity that he has had.

I feel I'm functioning at some level as a journalist because even though I write fiction, I'm trying to get the world accurate.

I think there'd be huge losses if there weren't newspapers. I know everything's shifting to the Internet and some people would say, 'News is news, what you're talking about is a change of consumption, not the product that's out there.' But I think there is a change.

What is important is not what you hear said, it's what you observe.

Well, did he do it?" She always asked the irrelevant question. It didn't matter in terms of the strategy of the case whether the defendant "did it" or not. What mattered was the evidence against him -- the proof -- and if and how it could be neutralized. My job was to bury the proof, to color the proof a shade of gray. Gray was the color of reasonable doubt.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.