I tend to write in the mornings.

That led me to say that when push comes to shove, I'm against capital punishment.

The prosecutor, who is supposed to carry the burden of proof, really is an author.

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

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

The one thing I would like more credit for is being part of a movement which involves recognising the importance of plot and asserting that books of literary worth could be written that had plots.

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.