I have in mind an experiment. Take an infant – regardless of ancestry, race, talent, or predilection, so long as he is essentially healthy – and I will make of him whatever you like. I will produce an artist, soldier, doctor, lawyer, priest; or I will raise him to be a thief. You may decide. The infant is equally capable of all these things. All that is required is training, time, and a properly controlled environment.

Like I knew it was bad. And there were these posters.

I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to listen. You know, being confident isn’t the same as being right.

Out popped Paul Duffy, in plain clothes except for a state police windbreaker and a badge clipped to his belt. He looked at me – I think by now I had dropped the bat to my side, at least, though I must have looked ridiculous anyway – and he raised his eyebrows. ‘Get back in the house, Babe Ruth.

I don’t ever write with a particular audience in mind. I just write books that please me.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to see things in your environment that confirm your preconceived ideas and not see things that conflict with what you already believe. I think maybe something like that happens with kids. You see what you want to see.

The truth is, the best win-lost records are not built on great trial work. They are built on cherry-picking only the strongest cases for trial and pleading out the rest, regardless of the right and wrong of it.

Nobody gets to you without going through me – and nobody’s getting through me.

Studies have shown that fathers of murdered children often die within a few years of the murder, often of heart failure. Really, they die of grief.

I can’t say that I ever actually decided to become a writer. It kind of snuck up on me.