If the rewards to authors go down, simple economics says there will be fewer authors. It's not that people won't burn with the passion to write. The number of people wanting to be novelists is probably not going to decline - but certainly the number of people who are going to be able to make a living as authors is going to dramatically decrease.

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

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

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

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

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

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.