Top 33 Scott Turow Quotes

The American preoccupation with the law, which is certainly not past, was at its zenith in 1995. The 1980s, the late 1980s, had sort of begun to percolate up to public consciousness this enormous interest in the law.

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

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.

Certainly, when I was a boy, people liked to believe that lawyers were kind of pillars of goodness of the likes of Atticus Finch in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’

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.

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

The great break of my literary career was going to law school.

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.

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.

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

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.

I’m of that generation of Jews still deeply influenced by the Holocaust. Certainly the notion that the state power to kill can be subject to such extraordinary abuse is always lurking beneath the surface for me. Certainly my experience and identity as a Jew is there.

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.

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.

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.

If life’s lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction.

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

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.

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.

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

People talk of me as being the inventor of the legal thriller.

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.

The first time I remember really being excited about a book was ‘The Count of Monte Cristo.’

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.

Postmodernism cost literature its audience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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