Scott Turow Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 everyone, and which, therefore, reflect our best vision of ourselves.

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

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

Who are we but the stories we tell about ourselves, particularly if we accept them?

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

Postmodernism cost literature its audience.

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.

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

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

Courage is not the absence of fear but the ability to carry on with dignity in spite of it.

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

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

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.

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.

There cannot be any greater challenge to the law than trying to adjudicate mass crimes like war crimes.

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

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.

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.

I tend to write in the mornings.

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.