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I don't like memoirs. I think they're self-serving, and people use them to settle scores, and I really tried not to do that. You have to have a really interesting life to justify memoir, and my life has been pretty ho-hum.

Much of my publishing life was consumed by the memoirs of movie stars - or by attempts to get them to write a memoir.

With my own memoirs, they are truthful, and I write everything fully expecting to some day end up televised on Court TV, and I'm fully prepared to be challenged legally on it.

I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.

With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.

Literally thousands of e-mails over the course of a book go out to people I've never met, people who might end up being the focus of a chapter.

Writing a memoir is such a private, personal experience that it's intimidating to think of adapting it for television.

I keep an ongoing list of my fifty favorite books, which I recalibrate whenever I discover a new one that seems to demand a spot there.

I'm a big believer in bibliotherapy. Books have the power to change lives: what we think and what we do.

Every time I get through the work on a book of nonfiction, I say I'll never do it again; it takes so much out of you.