When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become a novelist. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I could actually earn a living as a professional novelist.

We move through time like a man in a rowboat, looking back even as we move forward.

The interior of a teenager’s mind is an endless war between Stupid and Clever.

the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time.

Crime and legal stories, broadly speaking, are just where my interest happens to lie.

Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you—and it will find you