Nobody ever gets what they want when it comes to love.
For thousands and thousands of American kids, libraries are the only safe place they can find to study, a haven free from the dangers of street or the numbing temptations of television. As schools cut back services, the library looms even more important to countless children.
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 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.
I read little nonfiction, but I have no boundaries about the fiction I relish. The only unfailing criterion is that I can hitch my heart to the imagined world and read on.
You know, my mom, who inspired me to be a novelist, I remember her reading 'The Agony and the Ecstasy,' about Michelangelo, and saying, 'No mother would want that for her child, no matter how great the artist.' I have my share of demons, but I am a gregarious sort.
Certainly, when I was a boy, people liked to believe that lawyers were kind of pillars of goodness of the likes of Atticus Finch in 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'
The first time I remember really being excited about a book was 'The Count of Monte Cristo.'
Postmodernism cost literature its audience.
Widespread public access to knowledge, like public education, is one of the pillars of our democracy, a guarantee that we can maintain a well-informed citizenry.
In re-reading 'Presumed Innocent,' the one thing that struck me - and I re-read the book four different times in writing 'Innocent,' interested in different things each time - but I did think there were a couple of extra loops in the plot that I probably didn't need. The other thing that sort of amazed me was how discursive the book was.
'Presumed Innocent' was written over a six to seven year period with intervals in between where I was figuring out the end of the book and writing other stuff... My life as a writer was carried on against the odds. I had written four unpublished novels by then... as a writer of fiction, I hadn't gotten very far. I just wanted to do it.
On the streets, unrequited love and death go together almost as often as in Shakespeare.
I grew up on the north side of Chicago, in West Rogers Park, an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood. When I was 13, my parents moved to Winnetka, Illinois, an upper class, WASPy suburb where Jews - as well as Blacks and Catholics - were unwelcome on many blocks. I suffered the spiritual equivalent of whiplash.
Now, many public libraries want to lend e-books, not simply to patrons who come in to download, but to anybody with a reading device, a library card and an Internet connection. In this new reality, the only incentive to buy, rather than borrow, an e-book is the fact that the lent copy vanishes after a couple of weeks.
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.
