William Landay Quotes & Sayings

I am interested in computers and technology, and art, photography, and design. — William Landay

It was a limitation of human consciousness: We live only in the future and past, we cannot perceive now. Now occupies no space, a hypothetical gap between future and past. Only an exceptional few could feel now athletes and jazzmen and, yes, thieves ... — William Landay

A jury verdict is just a guess - a well-intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote. — William Landay

I had a childish attraction to men of my father's generation, as if I still harbored a faint hope of being unorphaned, even at this late date. — William Landay

But good friendships require complementary personalities, not identical ones. — William Landay

Nobody gets to you without going through me - and nobody's getting through me. — William Landay

The truth is, the best win-lost records are not built on great trial work. They are built on cherry-picking only the strongest cases for trial and pleading out the rest, regardless of the right and wrong of it. — William Landay

Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you - and it will find you — William Landay

But sometimes you can't figure everything out because you can't ever really understand other people. You can't understand why they do what they do. You just have to accept a little mystery, Ben. People are mysterious, the world is mysterious. You can't know everything. You're not supposed to. This isn't a history book. It's just the world. It's a messy place. — William Landay

A liberal, it turns out, is a conservative who's been indicted. — William Landay

Of course, that sort of dramatic email is — William Landay

An emotion is a thought, yes, an idea, but it is also a sensation, an ache in your body. Desire, love, hate, fear, repulsion - you feel these things in your muscle and bones, not just in your mind. — William Landay

The rest-the vast majority, tens of thousands of days-are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous. We glide through them then instantly forget them. We tend not to think about this arithmetic when we look back on our lives. We remember the handful of Big Days and throw away the rest.
We organize our long, shapeless lives into tidy little stories ... But our lives are mostly made up of junk, of ordinary, forgettable days, and 'The End' is never the end. — William Landay

Even the wettest violence, in the end, is cooked down to the stuff of court cases; a ream of paper, a few exhibits, a dozen ... witnesses. The world looks away, and why not? — William Landay

Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines. — William Landay

There is no absolute beginning to any story, after all. There is only the moment you begin watching. — William Landay

Witness: I thought it was a mistake. Based on what we knew at the time, it was a mistake to turn away from Patz as a suspect so early in the investigation. — William Landay

fingers into a beak and flapped it open and shut: talk, talk. "You never know. If you pick him up, he'll just call his lawyer. You might lose your only chance to talk to him." "No, it's better we pick him up. After that, you can sweet-talk him, Duff. That's what you're good at." "You sure?" "We can't have people saying we didn't push hard enough on this guy." The comment was off key, and a doubtful expression crossed Duffy's face. We had always made it a rule not to give a shit how things looked or what people thought. A prosecutor's judgment is supposed to be insulated from politics. "You know what I mean, Paul. This is the first credible — William Landay

Predisposition is not predestination. — William Landay

I have an idea that is is what enduring love really means, Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known. — William Landay

Practical in our expectations of the Criminal Law. ... [For] we have merely to imagine, by some trick of time travel, meeting our earliest hominid ancestor, Adam, a proto-man, short of stature, luxuriantly furred, newly bipedal, foraging about on the African — William Landay

We are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and have been since we began drawing on cave walls. — William Landay

I do not believe in the court system, at least I do not think it is especially good at finding the truth. No lawyer does. We have all seen too many mistakes, too many bad results. A jury verdict is just a guess - a well-intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote. And yet, despite all that, I do believe in the power of the ritual. I believe in the religious symbolism, the black robes, the marble-columned courthouses like Greek temples. When we hold a trial, we are saying a mass. We are praying together to do what is right and to be protected from danger, and that is worth doing whether or not our prayers are actually heard. — William Landay

My childhood ended that summer. I learned the word murder. But it is not enough to be told a word as big as that ... You have to live with it, carry it around with you. You have to ... see it from different angles, at different times of day, in different light, until you understand, until it enters you. — William Landay

I never expectedto lose in court. In practice, I did lose, of course. Every lawyer loses, just as every baseball player makes an out severy percent of the time he goes to bat. — William Landay

I don't ever write with a particular audience in mind. I just write books that please me. — William Landay

Out popped Paul Duffy, in plain clothes except for a state police windbreaker and a badge clipped to his belt. He looked at me - I think by now I had dropped the bat to my side, at least, though I must have looked ridiculous anyway - and he raised his eyebrows. 'Get back in the house, Babe Ruth. — William Landay

The interior of a teenager's mind is an endless war between Stupid and Clever. — William Landay

Probably careful plotting reflects my personality. I am meticulous by nature. I can't imagine speed-writing anything that happens to pop into my head. — William Landay

Somewhere she had learned that if an interviewer remains silent, the interviewee will rush to fill the silence. — William Landay

At some point as adults we cease to be our parents' children and we become our children's parents instead. — William Landay

A hint of nonconformity was all he would risk. — William Landay

you ever do it?" "It's a talent — William Landay

We're not arguing. We're discussing." "You're a lawyer; you don't know the difference. I'm arguing. — William Landay

I did not usually feel that sort of passion about any case, but I disliked this murderer already. For murdering, yes, but also for fucking with us. For refusing to submit. — William Landay

All they got locked up in this hole is my body. That's all they got, my body, not me. I'm everywhere, see? Everywhere you look, junior, everywhere you go. — William Landay

The leopard in the zoo wanders to the edge of his pen and, through the bars or across an unjumpable moat, he stares at you with contempt for your inferiority, for needing that barrier between you. There is a shared understanding in that moment, nonverbal but no less real: the leopard is predator and you are prey, and it is only the barrier that permits us humans to feel superior and secure. That feeling, standing at the leopard's cage, is edged with shame, at the animal's superior strength, at his hauteur, his low estimation of you. — William Landay

There are many more ways to be attractive than to be beautiful. — William Landay

Why risk the rare happy marriage-rarer still, a love marriage that endures-for something as common and toxic as complete, unthinking, transparent honesty? Who would be helped by my telling? Me? not at all. I was made of steel, I promise you. — William Landay

Don't worry about how things look. People are going to think whatever they think. To hell with 'em. You can't worry about it. — William Landay

I don't want you to say anything. I want you to listen. You know, being confident isn't the same as being right. — William Landay

Crime and legal stories, broadly speaking, are just where my interest happens to lie. — William Landay

Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical thinking, — William Landay

The human element in any system is always prone to error. Why should the courts be any different? They are not. Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance ... — William Landay

Genes are not simple triggers. No one is hardwired to commit murder or any other crime. Our actions are always the result of stupendously complex gene-environment interactions, and environment is likely to remain the more important influence by far. — William Landay

This is the best thing about men's friendships: most any awkwardness can be ignored by mutual agreement and, true connection being unimaginable, you can get on with the easier business of parallel living. — William Landay

At seventeen, I knew: my entire childhood had been just a prelude to this girl. I had never felt anything like it, and still haven't. I felt changed by her, physically.
I became a different person, myself, the person I am now. And everything that came after-my family, my home, our entire life together-was a gift she gave me. — William Landay

This is an aspect of crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price. — William Landay

You have to follow your intuition. That is what expertise is: all the experience, the cases won and lost, the painful mistakes, all the technical details you learn by rote repetition, over time these things leave you with an instinctive sense of your craft. A "gut" for it. — William Landay

School isn't supposed to be dangerous. It's not a place they should be afraid of. It's their second home. It's where they spend most of their waking hours. — William Landay

The act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty. — William Landay

The town's young parents especially prized this idea of Newton as a child's paradise. Many of them had left the hip, sophisticated city to move here. They had accepted massive expenses, stultifying monotony, and the queasy disappointment of settling for a conventional life. To — William Landay

I was greeted at the Magraths' apartment door by a dumpy, pie-faced woman with a frizz of unsprung black hair. She wore black spandex leggings and an oversized T-shirt with an equally oversized message stamped across the front: Don't Give Me Attitude, I Have One of My Own. This witticism ran six full lines, drawing my eyes southward over her person from wavering bosom to detumescent belly, a journey I regret even now. — William Landay

I'm a bit of a tech geek myself. — William Landay

I can't say that I ever actually decided to become a writer. It kind of snuck up on me. — William Landay

But then, we all tell ourselves stories about ourselves. The money man tells himself that by getting rich he is actually enriching others, the artist tells himself that his creations are things of deathless beauty, the soldier tells himself he is on the side of the angels. — William Landay

Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality. We do not punish the leopard for its wildness. — William Landay

Well, I outline fanatically. I am a long thinker and a slow writer, though I am trying to get faster. — William Landay

One worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed - but after all, we were children. — William Landay

In a long life there are thirty or thirty-five thousand days to be got through, but only a few dozen that really matter, Big Days when Something Momentous Happens. The rest - the vast majority, tens of thousands of days - are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous. — William Landay

It is, of course, the last resort of a liar to challenge his inquisitor to call him a liar directly. — William Landay

When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become a novelist. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I could actually earn a living as a professional novelist. — William Landay

You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time. — William Landay

So I got on with the business of lawyering away at the evidence. Minimizing it. Defending Jacob. — William Landay

I love sports, as all Bostonians seem to. I love books and movies, as all writers seem to. — William Landay

We move through time like a man in a rowboat, looking back even as we move forward. — William Landay

It was as if there was a place called After, and if I could just push my family across to that shore, then everything would be all right. There would be time for all these "soft" problems in the land of After. — William Landay

I rather doubt he had the sense to see the truth: that there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law's little binary distinctions-guilty/innocent, criminal/victim-cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel. — William Landay

No one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed — William Landay

A good marriage drags a long tail of memory behind it. A single word or gesture, a tone of voice can conjure up so many remembrances. — William Landay

I did not speak. I have found in any Q&A, in court, in witness interviews, wherever, often the best thing you can do is wait, say nothing. The witness will want to fill the awkward silence. He will feel a vague compassion to keep talking, to prove he is not holding back, to prove he is smart and in the know, to earn your trust. — William Landay

Good stories are driven by conflict, tension, and high stakes. — William Landay

Every father knows the disconcerting when you see your child as a weird, distorted double of yourself. It is as if for a moment your identities overlap. You see an idea, a conception of your boyish inner self ... made real and flesh.
He is you restarted, rewound; at the same time he is as foreign and unknowable as any other person. — William Landay

You're staring.'
'You're my wife. I'm allowed to stare.'
'Is that the rule?'
'Yes. Stare, leer, ogle, anything I want. Trust me. I'm a lawyer. — William Landay

With the minivan in the air, rolling counterclockwise, the engine racing, Laurie screaming
a fraction of a second, that's all
Jacob would have thought of me
who had held him, my own baby, looked down into his eyes
and he would have understood I loved him, no matter what, to the very end
as he saw the concrete wall flying forward to meet him. — William Landay