Scott Turow Quotes

“Nobody ever gets what they want when it comes to love.”

— Scott Turow

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

— Scott Turow

After a week, it's better. I miss her. I mourn her. But some peace has returned. She had been so unattainable - so young, so much a citizen of a different era - that it is hard to feel fully deprived.

— 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

“Anna is part of a generation that often seems frozen in place by their unreleting sense of irony. Virtually everything people believe in can be exposed as possessing laughable inconsistencies. And so they laugh. And stand still.”

— Scott Turow

“It wasn't luck or the order of the universe. It was simply what had happened.”

— 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

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

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

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

“It was something like stirring concrete with my eyelashes.”

— 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

“I was willing to do it. was determined to do it. By the end of the day, that had become my reaction to all of the signs of hard things ahead - a new purposefulness, hardy resolve. Everything I'd encountered so far - the law, my classmates, the great piece of discovery - had left me in deep thrall and I was bent on making sure that continued. I would have the best of it, I decided, whatever the obstacles.”

— Scott Turow

“On the streets, unrequited love and death go together almost as often as in Shakespeare.”

— 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

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

— 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

“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

“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 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

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.

— 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

“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

“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

“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

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

— Scott Turow

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

— Scott Turow

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

— Scott Turow

“I practise law almost every day. Exclusively criminal work these days.”

— Scott Turow

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

— 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

“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

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

“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

“'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

“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

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

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

“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

“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

“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

“'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 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.”

— 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

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

“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

“The overwhelmingly successful trial book of my early adolescence had been To Kill A Mocking Bird.”

— 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

“'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

“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