Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I've never been under the illusion that everybody on death row is innocent - far from it. My own guess is upwards of 90 percent are guilty. But a ten percent error rate if that's what it is, or even five percent, is really way too high. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

Place

American

Children

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

" 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

Power

Identity

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

People

Truth

" 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. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Credit

Good

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 'Reversible Errors' is about the limits of the law to define who committed ultimate evil, to define what ultimate evil is, to allow the million arbitrary factors to make this a meaningful punishment, and finally to say, 'Are we really accomplishing what we wanted to accomplish? Are those anxieties relieved?' I don't think so. "

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

" 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. "

" I tend to start with a kernel, a vague concept, and just begin to write things down - notes about a character, lines of dialogue, descriptive passages about a place. One idea fires another. I do that for about a year. By then there's a story, and I'll go on to a complete first draft that sews many of those ragtag pieces together. "

" I'm an ambitious person, and Harvard makes me feel successful, just having gotten in here. That's the ugly side of why I'm proud of being at Harvard Law School. Another reason is because there's a spirit of serious intellectual endeavor here. "

" 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

People

Live

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

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

" 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. "

" I always say, and I mean it, that the great break of my literary career was when I went to law school. "

" 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. "

" Postmodernism cost literature its audience. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

Desk

Grandfather

" I really believe that the movie will never be as good as the book, both because the book goes on longer - a movie is basically an abridgment of a book - and because books are internal. But they are incredibly powerful. The visual format is, you know, amazing. "