Hailey [as a character] was born when I left the courtroom and moved to New York for Cochran and Grace, my TV show with Johnnie Cochran. I moved with two boxes of clothes, a curling iron, and $300; I didn't know a soul in the city, so I would come home at night and I'd be all alone and just write. I missed the courtroom and [what led me to the courtroom] so much I wrote about it. After my fiancé Keith's murder, I had never thought I would have children - I thought that it was not God's plan for me to have a family.

I wouldn't call it "police reform," but I would say that police procedure enhancement could be helpful - these police shootings are absolutely horrible.

I'd love to branch out but I have absolutely no interest in romance. I just don't. The thought of trying to write a rom-com ... it just completely skeeves me out. No!

If I listened to my critics, I would still be at home under my bed right now.

I don't expect everybody to like me. If you try to please everybody, by changing your position and your personality, every time you do that you lose a little bit of yourself.

I cracked a child prostitution ring - I'd worked with three vice cops every day for months, out on the street, in the cold, trying to track down the pervs and the young girls being prostituted.We finally got the convictions.Six or seven months later, I was working, and I glanced up at the TV, and it was a report on a federal case.It was all three of them, in federal court, in handcuffs. Every time they busted a drug lord or a doper, they'd take all their money and their jewelry and flat screens before sending them to jail. They had been stealing from dopers for years!

My father was a railroad man his entire life; 43 years for Southern Railroad.