Scott Turow Quotes & Sayings

Life is simply experience; for reasons not readily discerned, we attempt to go on. — Scott Turow

I think lawyers have a fidelity to the system itself that's always got to be with them, and indeed, most of the defense lawyers I know observe that. — Scott Turow

You accept that it happened. But you know that life burned this hole in your heart and it's not going to heal. — Scott Turow

The truth of the matter is that the people who succeed in the arts most often are the people who get up again after getting knocked down. Persistence is critical. — Scott Turow

I am a law student in my first year at the law, and there are many moments when I am simply a mess. — Scott Turow

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity. — Scott Turow

Aristophanes says we were all four-legged creatures to start, some the same sex, but most half man and half woman. Zeus was afraid us humans would get too powerful so he sliced us right down the middle, and everybody spends their life looking for the matching piece. — Scott Turow

I'm an ambitious person, and Harvard makes me feel successful, just having gotten in here. That's the ugly side of why I'm proud of being at Harvard Law School. Another reason is because there's a spirit of serious intellectual endeavor here. — Scott Turow

I keep two sentimental mementos on my desk to remind me of two favorite men. There is an inkwell that my Uncle Seymour made, a brass grotesque he mounted on a marble base. And my grandfather's shaving cup is there, used to store pencils and pens. — Scott Turow

If the rewards to authors go down, simple economics says there will be fewer authors. It's not that people won't burn with the passion to write. The number of people wanting to be novelists is probably not going to decline - but certainly the number of people who are going to be able to make a living as authors is going to dramatically decrease. — Scott Turow

I tend to write in the mornings. — Scott Turow

I think one of the blessings that I've had in watching, you know, films be made now from four of my books is to realize that it's a separate thing. It's a separate work. — Scott Turow

Postmodernism cost literature its audience. — Scott Turow

Widespread public access to knowledge, like public education, is one of the pillars of our democracy, a guarantee that we can maintain a well-informed citizenry. — Scott Turow

Basbanes makes you love books. — Scott Turow

I count myself as one of millions of Americans whose life simply would not be the same without the libraries that supported my learning. — Scott Turow

The joke was thinking you were ever really in charge of your life. You pressed your oar down into the water to direct the canoe, but it was the current that shot you through the rapids. You just hung on and hoped not to hit a rock or a whirlpool. — Scott Turow

Life, of course, is full of people you discover you like a lot and then never see again. — Scott Turow

There is nothing like the plumbing fixtures to remind you that you're not in Kansas anymore. By — Scott Turow

I am the prosecutor. I represent the state. I am here to present to you the evidence of a crime. Together you will weigh this evidence. You will deliberate upon it. You will decide if it proves the defendant's guilt. — Scott Turow

Being a lawyer, even in a city as large as Chicago, is like being a citizen of a small town. I love watching the life of the town play out. You know, the rise and fall of individual lives in the entire community is just fascinating to me. — Scott Turow

At the end of the day, perhaps the best argument against capital punishment may be that it is an issue beyond the limited capacity of government to get things right. — Scott Turow

The overwhelmingly successful trial book of my early adolescence had been To Kill A Mocking Bird. — Scott Turow

lawyer by training, Kajevic had the same talent as Hitler, making his gargantuan self-importance a proxy for his country's and his rantings the voice of his people's long-suppressed rage. — Scott Turow

People talk of me as being the inventor of the legal thriller. — Scott Turow

It was something like stirring concrete with my eyelashes. — Scott Turow

The first time I remember really being excited about a book was 'The Count of Monte Cristo.' — Scott Turow

I always say, and I mean it, that the great break of my literary career was when I went to law school. — Scott Turow

For all of my success, in looking back I couldn't identify a moment when, at core, I had felt fully at home with myself. My — Scott Turow

Amazon can't be all good or all bad. I don't think that everything they do is evil; they've given a lot of authors access. — Scott Turow

The one thing I would like more credit for is being part of a movement which involves recognising the importance of plot and asserting that books of literary worth could be written that had plots. — Scott Turow

It was crime at its purest, in which empathy, that most fundamental aspect of human morality, evaporated and another being became only a target for untamed fantasy. — Scott Turow

That led me to say that when push comes to shove, I'm against capital punishment. — Scott Turow

Was love worth not having the life you wanted? — Scott Turow

I adore the company of other writers because they are so often lively minds and, frequently, blazingly funny. And of course, we get each other in a unique way. — Scott Turow

There are a whole lot of little tales told in 'Presumed Innocent,' whether it's about the Hobberly kid, who was an important witness who ends up assassinated, or an accountant named Marcy Lupino, who meets a horrible fate in a state penitentiary. There's less of that in 'Innocent,' and deliberately so. — Scott Turow

I'm a computer guy, and one of the things I did with the good fortune that 'Presumed Innocent' brought me was to buy one of the very first laptop computers. It weighed about eight and a half pounds, by the way. — Scott Turow

I tend to start with a kernel, a vague concept, and just begin to write things down - notes about a character, lines of dialogue, descriptive passages about a place. One idea fires another. I do that for about a year. By then there's a story, and I'll go on to a complete first draft that sews many of those ragtag pieces together. — Scott Turow

Generally, I like to write in the morning before all the dust of dreams has blown away. Beforehand, I read two papers, cook my breakfast and then settle down in front of the word processor, usually by 8 A.M. I'll write, and then check e-mail or voicemail when things stall. — Scott Turow

offering silent tribute to the unwillingness of any bureaucracy to go out of business. By — Scott Turow

Libraries function as crucial technology hubs, not merely for free Web access, but those who need computer training and assistance. Library business centers help support entrepreneurship and retraining. — Scott Turow

Musicians make up for the copies of their songs that get pirated by performing live. I don't think there will be as many people showing up to hear me read as to hear Beyonce sing. We need to make sure piracy is dealt with effectively. — Scott Turow

Every American is from somewhere else. Each is hated for what he brings that is different from the rest. We live in uneasy peace. But it is peace, for the most part. — Scott Turow

Americans have grown a great deal more realistic about lawyers and the law. I think that's all for the good. A lot of people will say to you these days, 'If you are looking for justice, don't go to a courtroom.' That's just a more realistic perspective on what happens in the legal process. — Scott Turow

Nobody ever gets what they want when it comes to love. — Scott Turow

'Black Beauty,' by Anna Sewell, remains a star-dusted memory because my mom read it aloud to my sister and me at night for months. I was no more than 7. — Scott Turow

For thousands and thousands of American kids, libraries are the only safe place they can find to study, a haven free from the dangers of street or the numbing temptations of television. As schools cut back services, the library looms even more important to countless children. — Scott Turow

I spent four of my five years at Stanford writing a novel I was unable to sell. — Scott Turow

Who are we but the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and believe? — Scott Turow

The fundamental tension of the profession is the struggle between bold advocacy of the client's interests and the need to establish and hold to limits that prevent advocacy from leading to irrational and inequitable results; and thus the lawyer's job in practice is to be on one hand the impassioned representative of his client to the world, and on the other the wise representative to his client of the legal system, and the society, explaining and upholding the demands and restrictions which that system places on them both. — Scott Turow

He smiled hesitantly and she smiled back in the same fashion, but he was unsettled by the thought that Muriel had undergone a transformation. Some of the stuff that had come out of her mouth lately, about God or babies, made him wonder if she'd had a brain transplant at some point in the last ten years. It was funny what happened to people after forty, when they realized that our place here on earth was leased, not owned. — Scott Turow

I hate second-guessing other lawyers because I know that I've tried and lost cases, and somebody could sit there and say, 'Should have done it this way,' and they'd have been right. — Scott Turow

You know, my mom, who inspired me to be a novelist, I remember her reading 'The Agony and the Ecstasy,' about Michelangelo, and saying, 'No mother would want that for her child, no matter how great the artist.' I have my share of demons, but I am a gregarious sort. — Scott Turow

I practise law almost every day. Exclusively criminal work these days. — Scott Turow

He had people to love, who, best of all, loved him, too. He didn't feel it made sense to waste the energy on relationships that would only pull him under some emotional waterfall in which he'd never catch his breath. — Scott Turow

I've never been under the illusion that everybody on death row is innocent - far from it. My own guess is upwards of 90 percent are guilty. But a ten percent error rate if that's what it is, or even five percent, is really way too high. — Scott Turow

Los Angeles for many years had operated with a police department that was far smaller than other police departments had in areas of comparable or larger size, New York and Chicago being the most obvious examples. — Scott Turow

'Presumed Innocent' was written over a six to seven year period with intervals in between where I was figuring out the end of the book and writing other stuff ... My life as a writer was carried on against the odds. I had written four unpublished novels by then ... as a writer of fiction, I hadn't gotten very far. I just wanted to do it. — Scott Turow

The law, for all its failings, has a noble goal - to make the little bit of life that people can actually control more just. We can't end disease or natural disasters, but we can devise rules for our dealings with one another that fairly weigh the rights and needs of evreyone, and withich, therefore, reflect our best vision of ourselves. — Scott Turow

Now, many public libraries want to lend e-books, not simply to patrons who come in to download, but to anybody with a reading device, a library card and an Internet connection. In this new reality, the only incentive to buy, rather than borrow, an e-book is the fact that the lent copy vanishes after a couple of weeks. — Scott Turow

All my life, I've wanted to write a book inspired by my relationship with my grandfather. Basically, my grandfather was a guy who everybody in the family regarded as disagreeable at best. But I loved him intensely. He was wonderful to me. — Scott Turow

'Reversible Errors' is about the limits of the law to define who committed ultimate evil, to define what ultimate evil is, to allow the million arbitrary factors to make this a meaningful punishment, and finally to say, 'Are we really accomplishing what we wanted to accomplish? Are those anxieties relieved?' I don't think so. — Scott Turow

I read little nonfiction, but I have no boundaries about the fiction I relish. The only unfailing criterion is that I can hitch my heart to the imagined world and read on. — Scott Turow

alter kocker like me. Street-word is Hal hired Coral — Scott Turow

Hey," he said, "you won't ever meet a man who likes women better than me. They're the best thing on the planet. And I don't just mean horizontal. Women hold the world together. — Scott Turow

Accept dear God the soul of Dixon Hartnell, who made his own amends and who travelled his own way. He failed as we all fail, and perhaps more often than some. Yet he recognized fundamental things. Not that we are evil; for we are not. But that, by whatever name
self interest, impulse, anger, lust, or greed
we are inclined that way; and that it is our tragedy to know this can never change, our duty to try at every moment to overcome it; and our glory occasionally to succeed. — Scott Turow

As a defense lawyer, he refused to condemn his clients. Everyone else in the system
the cops, the prosecutors, the juries and judges
would take care of that; they didn't need his help. — Scott Turow

There will always be cases that cry out to me for ultimate punishment. That is not the true issue. The pivotal question instead is whether a system of justice can be constructed that reaches only the rare, right cases, without also occasionally condemning the innocent or the undeserving. — Scott Turow

I trained as a writer before I became a lawyer. I was headed for a life as an English professor, but that just wasn't me. I'm not a scholar; I didn't have a scholar's attitude toward literature. — Scott Turow

Poison Pill is a great reading. The novel ranges from Russian oligarchs to the American worlds of drug research and the equity markets, all of it in a mode of high suspense. — Scott Turow

I grew up on the north side of Chicago, in West Rogers Park, an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood. When I was 13, my parents moved to Winnetka, Illinois, an upper class, WASPy suburb where Jews - as well as Blacks and Catholics - were unwelcome on many blocks. I suffered the spiritual equivalent of whiplash. — Scott Turow

I love criminal law. It must be the Dostoyevskian streak in me. I'm fascinated by the accumulation of forces that make people behave in ways that everybody else hates. — Scott Turow

'Torts' more or less means 'wrongs' ... One of my friends said that Torts is the course which proves that your mother was right. — Scott Turow

On the streets, unrequited love and death go together almost as often as in Shakespeare. — Scott Turow

It wasn't luck or the order of the universe. It was simply what had happened. — Scott Turow

live with somebody, peaceably, dreaming beside each other, sharing meals, making a family, but there seems no special excitement to it, even though you know, as Tim did, that you're living with a person of exceptional kindness. And then she's gone and the depth of the loss almost surpasses understanding, even when you realize you're also mourning your loneliness, and the inevitability of it. Judge — Scott Turow

The hardest part is not to repeat yourself. I don't really believe my core obsessions are going to change, but you need to look for ways to express them that are different. The main reason for doing that is not to bore yourself, and obviously, I don't want to bore readers. — Scott Turow

If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction. — Scott Turow

I was one of those kids who never wanted to be anything but a novelist. And I don't know a lot of people who truly live the life that they dreamed of. — Scott Turow

I don't know if a novelist ever fully detaches him- or herself from what they wrote and the way they wrote it. I can watch 'Presumed Innocent' again and again, and I will always be bothered by the same things that will never bother anybody else. — Scott Turow

I've become President of the Author's Guild, and, in part because they thought I had to know what I was talking about and also as a sort of coronation present, they got me an iPad. And I have to tell you, I'm crazy about it. It's got some bugs, but it's basically replaced my laptop. I'm very happy with it. — Scott Turow

This is life. You know the philosphers? The Present never stops. There's only the Present. You cheat life if you live in the Past. — Scott Turow

In re-reading 'Presumed Innocent,' the one thing that struck me - and I re-read the book four different times in writing 'Innocent,' interested in different things each time - but I did think there were a couple of extra loops in the plot that I probably didn't need. The other thing that sort of amazed me was how discursive the book was. — Scott Turow

I never really felt free to talk a lot about my family life because I don't want to sacrifice anybody else's privacy. If you look through the archives, you will see, for example, no pictures of my children. That is not because I don't love them. I think I've been a really good dad; at least, I try to be. — Scott Turow

The prosecutor, who is supposed to carry the burden of proof, really is an author. — Scott Turow

Like most Americans of my age, I was very impressed by the dynamic capacities of the law, demonstrated by the Civil Rights Movement and then Watergate, animated by Sam Ervin's mantra that no person is above the law. — Scott Turow

I cannot think of a day in my life when the library didn't exert a potent attraction for me, offering a sense of the specialness of each individual's curiosity and his or her quest to satisfy it. — Scott Turow

That's why so many people want to be victims today. So they don't have to accept the burden of being raised without historical calamity - without war or famine. They want an excuse for the fact they're still not happy. — Scott Turow

There are lots of things about Amazon for which they deserve credit. They're innovative. There are lots of very, very happy Amazon customers. I'm not here to dispute that Amazon has been personally good for me or to say that they haven't been, so far, good to their customers. — Scott Turow

Because I spend so much time traveling, I tend to do most of my reading on the same iPad on which I write. For me, it's words, not paper, that matter most in the end. This practice has had the additional benefit of greatly reducing the time I spend storming through the house, defaming the mysterious forces who 'hid my book.' — Scott Turow

What kills a person at twenty-five? Leukemia. An accident. But George knows the better odds are that someone who passes at that age dies of unhappiness. Drug overdose. Suicide. Reckless behavior. — Scott Turow

All my novels are about the ambiguities that lie beneath the sharp edges of the law. — Scott Turow

The issue is not whether there are horrible cases where the penalty seems "right". The real question is whether we will ever design a capital system that reaches only the "right" cases, without dragging in the wrong cases, cases of innocence or cases where death is not proportionate punishment. Slowly, even reluctantly, I have realized the answer to that question is no- we will never get it right. — Scott Turow

I don't like re-writing very much. The fourth and the fifth draft - that's too much like work. There's not much inspiration about it, and the lawyerly side kicks in - being very careful and somewhat technical. — Scott Turow

The years roll on and life seems like this more and more, that choices don't really exit in the way I thought they would when I was a child and expected the regal power of adulthood to provide clarity and insight. — Scott Turow

Like every other hypocrite alive, he was very good at applying unyielding standards to others. Bozic — Scott Turow

I really do believe that chance favours a prepared mind. Wallace Stegner, who was one of my teachers when I was at Stanford, preached that writing a novel is not something that can be done in a sprint. That it's a marathon. You have to pace yourself. He himself wrote two pages every day and gave himself a day off at Christmas. His argument was at the end of a year, no matter what, you'd got 700 pages and that there's got to be something worth keeping. — Scott Turow

My sister was a twin, and the other baby died in childbirth, and I was three at the time, and I always kind of thought it haunted me. It was a weird thing. My dad was an ob-gyn, and so it was confusing that the other baby didn't come home from the hospital. — Scott Turow

I am a big believer in the fact that all authors really write only one book. — Scott Turow

I write based on powerful inner impulses, and those seem to shift over time. — Scott Turow