Several of my favorite cousins and some of my best friends are lawyers, and I find the profession endlessly fascinating.

I was married to a law student, and I used to attend classes with him at Georgetown University Law Center. Being of dramatic bent, I was drawn mainly to Criminal law and Evidence classes. A just-beginning writer, I would find an empty chair and listen, mesmerized, to the lectures.

Little Night' comes from deep in my heart, and tells about the lengths people will go for love.

One of my earliest memories is of seeing my mother in her beach chair, reading a book under an umbrella by the water's edge while my sisters and I played beside her. Of all the life lessons she taught me, that is one of my favorites: to take time at a place I love, restore my spirit with books and the beach.

To give money to a woman - and here I must speak as a man - is to deny her special quality, her irreplaceability, and reduce her unique amiability to a commodity. Money takes away her name, while transforming her lover into a nameless customer of a market of appetites.

I might be celibate, but I appreciate the wonder of the sacrament of marriage.

Once I found professional happiness, it gave me time to think about other areas in my life in which I wasn't happy. The next obvious candidate for introspection was my marriage.

If I did not have my wife, I wouldn't be married, I wouldn't have the life that I have and I wouldn't have my wonderful baby boy who's not a baby anymore - he's going to be eight-years-old.