I will say that the prison regime is rather a good one for a writer because you have plenty of time to write.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing.
Well I think after leaving prison, and having written three diaries about life in prison, it became a sort of a new challenge to write another novel, to write a new novel.
When it comes to the point where you occasionally look forward to being in prison on the basis that you might be able to spend a day reading a book, the realization dawns that perhaps the situation has become a little more stressful than you would like.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
Prison works.
We crime novelists have a great pulpit. We write about justice and about correcting injustice.
I'm a fast writer, and crime novels are easy to do. It's much harder to write a 1,000 word article, where everything has to be 100 per cent correct.
For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Prisons and jails, I tend to feel that you're actually safer as a journalist than you might think, certainly more than it appears.
The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.