What kills a person at twenty-five? Leukemia. An accident. But George knows the better odds are that someone who passes at that age dies of unhappiness. Drug overdose. Suicide. Reckless behavior.

I cannot think of a day in my life when the library didn’t exert a potent attraction for me, offering a sense of the specialness of each individual’s curiosity and his or her quest to satisfy it.

I have a hard time isolating what it is in myself that makes me so fascinated with the theme of identity, because I came from a normal upper middle-class family. And yet, as I look back at my books, the uses of power, issues of identity, they have - it's recurrent. It happens again and again.

Poison Pill is a great reading. The novel ranges from Russian oligarchs to the American worlds of drug research and the equity markets, all of it in a mode of high suspense.

People talk of me as being the inventor of the legal thriller.

I count myself as one of millions of Americans whose life simply would not be the same without the libraries that supported my learning.

Courage is not the absence of fear but the ability to carry on with dignity in spite of it.