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I applied for a job at 'The New York Times' many years ago, and felt correctly that my life depended on it.

It changed my life in a lot of ways - before I got that role I was just going from job to job, not really having enough money to be able to do what I wanted to do.

I happened to fall into a job that wound up being a seminal piece of television history, which was a show I did on HBO called 'The Wire.' That experience really set the bar for me and opened a lot of doors. It also gave me a lot of street cred in terms of my phone ringing and job offers.

I'd started working when I was 21 and had been very determined about my career, very focused, even as a little kid, so it was something I had been working at for a long time.

I was a handyman in an office building across from Penn Station for two entire summers while I was still in school and the summer after. I had to wear a big, gray jumpsuit kind of thing that had the name of the company in a big patch on my chest, and I was sent to fix things and didn't know what I was doing.

We go through our careers and things happen to us. Those experiences made me what I am.

Up until 1995, I still had a day job that I hated. I was still personally involved in things in the 90s.

I knew what my job was; it was to go out and meet the people and love them.

I've always been fascinated by how the past impacts the present. For the first half of my career as a novelist, I wrote psychological suspense mysteries. I wanted to be a therapist but was told that while I was a fine diagnostician, I would be a terrible therapist because I wanted to solve everyone's problems.