The great break of my literary career was going to law school.

My view is that popular fiction as it existed was just plain dumb, and literary fiction was either abstruse, or unbelievably boring.

I love criminal law. It must be the Dostoyevskian streak in me. I'm fascinated by the accumulation of forces that make people behave in ways that everybody else hates.

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.

The American preoccupation with the law, which is certainly not past, was at its zenith in 1995. The 1980s, the late 1980s, had sort of begun to percolate up to public consciousness this enormous interest in the law.

For in a literary career there was one unfailing advantage: No degree whatever of moral or social disgrace could disqualify one from practice - and indeed a bad character, if suitably tricked out for presentation, might win one helpful publicity.