Maybe it has something to do with being a reporter for a long time that I don't look to newspapers and television and so forth for inspiration most of the time.

There is no client as scary as an innocent man.

If the system turns away from the abuses inflicted on the guilty, then who can be next but the innocents?

I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.

You can't patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more.

I think I would spend the first 30 weeks not writing, just clearing my head and seeing parts of the world I haven't seen and going back to places I have seen and love.

I went into journalism to learn the craft of writing and to get close to the world I wanted to write about - police and criminals, the criminal justice system.

There is nothing you can do about the past except keep it there.

I'm a disciple of Raymond Chandler, who said in his essays that there's a quality of redemption in anything that can be called art.

Any writer would rather dig into character than dig into fancy plots.

The time is coming when we have to stand before the Lord to give account of our works

Chained in a cell, got my own private hell. Preacher crucifies me, warden wants to fry me.

Whether or not the President is sleeping well won't be a factor in his re-election. That will depend on what he does while he is awake.

We live in a world changing so rapidly that what we mean frequently by common sense is doing the thing that would have been right last year.

A room to myself is a luxury that I do not always enjoy.

I think my younger self would be more amazed to know I was doing an interview for 'The Spectator.

The aim of scientific work is truth. While we internally recognise something as true, we judge, and while we utter judgements, we assert.

If we are not our brother's keeper, at least let us not be his executioner.

We tend to love things that are left of center anyway.

When students scoff at the idea of a magical relation between a picture and what it represents, ask them to take a photograph of their mother and cut out the eyes.