Scott Turow Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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.

The Guild is the authoritative voice of American writers.

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

People are offering competing visions of what happened in the past. And the justice system is willing to accept either of those competing visions and to impose consequences as a result. When you think of it that way, it's a little bit startling, because we want to believe that there is one truth and, therefore, one justice, whereas, if you have practiced law as long as I have, you realize that there is actually a range of acceptable outcomes.

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

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.

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.

Basbanes makes you love books.

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

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.

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.

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

I have a hard time isolating what it is in myself that makes me so fascinated with the theme of identity, because I came from a normal upper middle-class family. And yet, as I look back at my books, the uses of power, issues of identity, they have - it's recurrent. It happens again and again.