I really do believe that chance favours a prepared mind. Wallace Stegner, who was one of my teachers when I was at Stanford, preached that writing a novel is not something that can be done in a sprint. That it's a marathon. You have to pace yourself. He himself wrote two pages every day and gave himself a day off at Christmas. His argument was at the end of a year, no matter what, you'd got 700 pages and that there's got to be something worth keeping.

I tend to write in the mornings.

On the streets, unrequited love and death go together almost as often as in Shakespeare.

I am a law student in my first year at the law, and there are many moments when I am simply a mess.

Who are we but the stories we tell about ourselves, particularly if we accept them?

Nobody ever gets what they want when it comes to love.

There cannot be any greater challenge to the law than trying to adjudicate mass crimes like war crimes.