Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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

Movement

Credit

Worth

Related Quotes:

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

" 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 don't like re-writing very much. The fourth and the fifth draft - that's too much like work. There's not much inspiration about it, and the lawyerly side kicks in - being very careful and somewhat technical. "

" In re-reading 'Presumed Innocent,' the one thing that struck me - and I re-read the book four different times in writing 'Innocent,' interested in different things each time - but I did think there were a couple of extra loops in the plot that I probably didn't need. The other thing that sort of amazed me was how discursive the book was. "

" 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. "

" Now, many public libraries want to lend e-books, not simply to patrons who come in to download, but to anybody with a reading device, a library card and an Internet connection. In this new reality, the only incentive to buy, rather than borrow, an e-book is the fact that the lent copy vanishes after a couple of weeks. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

Scott Turow

Knowledge

Education

" 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. "

" 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 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 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. "

" Because I spend so much time traveling, I tend to do most of my reading on the same iPad on which I write. For me, it's words, not paper, that matter most in the end. This practice has had the additional benefit of greatly reducing the time I spend storming through the house, defaming the mysterious forces who 'hid my book.' "

" I grew up on the north side of Chicago, in West Rogers Park, an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood. When I was 13, my parents moved to Winnetka, Illinois, an upper class, WASPy suburb where Jews - as well as Blacks and Catholics - were unwelcome on many blocks. I suffered the spiritual equivalent of whiplash. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I tend to write in the mornings. "

" 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

" '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. "

" 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. "

" There are a whole lot of little tales told in 'Presumed Innocent,' whether it's about the Hobberly kid, who was an important witness who ends up assassinated, or an accountant named Marcy Lupino, who meets a horrible fate in a state penitentiary. There's less of that in 'Innocent,' and deliberately so. "

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

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

" 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. "

" '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. "

" 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 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. "