Top 95 Turow's Quotes
#1. I'm about to read Scott Turow's 'Innocent.' I've been hungry for this book since he first told me it was in the works. I'm a serious Turow fan.
Ridley Pearson
#2. Aristophanes says we were all four-legged creatures to start, some the same sex, but most half man and half woman. Zeus was afraid us humans would get too powerful so he sliced us right down the middle, and everybody spends their life looking for the matching piece.
Scott Turow
#3. 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
#4. That led me to say that when push comes to shove, I'm against capital punishment.
Scott Turow
#5. 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
#6. You know, my mom, who inspired me to be a novelist, I remember her reading 'The Agony and the Ecstasy,' about Michelangelo, and saying, 'No mother would want that for her child, no matter how great the artist.' I have my share of demons, but I am a gregarious sort.
Scott Turow
#7. 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
#8. '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
#9. The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.
Scott Turow
#10. On the streets, unrequited love and death go together almost as often as in Shakespeare.
Scott Turow
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. The joke was thinking you were ever really in charge of your life. You pressed your oar down into the water to direct the canoe, but it was the current that shot you through the rapids. You just hung on and hoped not to hit a rock or a whirlpool.
Scott Turow
#14. 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.
Scott Turow
#15. 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.
Scott Turow
#16. Only in the mystery novel are we delivered final and unquestionable solutions. The joke to me is that fiction gives you a truth that reality can't deliver.
Scott Turow
#17. Like every other hypocrite alive, he was very good at applying unyielding standards to others. Bozic
Scott Turow
#18. It wasn't luck or the order of the universe. It was simply what had happened.
Scott Turow
#19. It was something like stirring concrete with my eyelashes.
Scott Turow
#20. 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
#21. 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.
Scott Turow
#22. I spent four of my five years at Stanford writing a novel I was unable to sell.
Scott Turow
#23. Who are we but the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and believe?
Scott Turow
#24. 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
#25. Every American is from somewhere else. Each is hated for what he brings that is different from the rest. We live in uneasy peace. But it is peace, for the most part.
Scott Turow
#26. 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.
Scott Turow
#27. The first time I remember really being excited about a book was 'The Count of Monte Cristo.'
Scott Turow
#29. There will always be cases that cry out to me for ultimate punishment. That is not the true issue. The pivotal question instead is whether a system of justice can be constructed that reaches only the rare, right cases, without also occasionally condemning the innocent or the undeserving.
Scott Turow
#30. 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
#31. I confess to loving a good murder mystery - anything by Scott Turow or John Grisham. Maybe it's a holdover from my days as a criminal prosecutor in Seattle.
Gary Locke
#32. 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
#33. Life, of course, is full of people you discover you like a lot and then never see again.
Scott Turow
#34. The overwhelmingly successful trial book of my early adolescence had been To Kill A Mocking Bird.
Scott Turow
#35. You accept that it happened. But you know that life burned this hole in your heart and it's not going to heal.
Scott Turow
#36. I am a law student in my first year at the law, and there are many moments when I am simply a mess.
Scott Turow
#37. 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
#38. 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.
Scott Turow
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#43. Hey," he said, "you won't ever meet a man who likes women better than me. They're the best thing on the planet. And I don't just mean horizontal. Women hold the world together.
Scott Turow
#44. All my novels are about the ambiguities that lie beneath the sharp edges of the law.
Scott Turow
#45. Postmodernism cost literature its audience.
Scott Turow
#46. Thus for me, the principal meaning of being a Jew was something people reliably held against me, a barrier to overcome.
Scott Turow
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. The Guild is the authoritative voice of American writers.
Scott Turow
#50. The prosecutor, who is supposed to carry the burden of proof, really is an author.
Scott Turow
#51. '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
#52. 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
#53. He had people to love, who, best of all, loved him, too. He didn't feel it made sense to waste the energy on relationships that would only pull him under some emotional waterfall in which he'd never catch his breath.
Scott Turow
#54. 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
#55. There is nothing like the plumbing fixtures to remind you that you're not in Kansas anymore. By
Scott Turow
#56. I took his eating habits and gourmet knowledge as signifiers for other cultural and economic characteristics.
Eve Turow
#57. 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
#58. That's why so many people want to be victims today. So they don't have to accept the burden of being raised without historical calamity - without war or famine. They want an excuse for the fact they're still not happy.
Scott Turow
#59. At the start of the twenty-first century, the advertising industry is guiding one of history's most massive stealth efforts in social profiling.
Joseph Turow
#60. 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.
Scott Turow
#61. If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction.
Scott Turow
#62. 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.
Scott Turow
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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.
Scott Turow
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. People talk of me as being the inventor of the legal thriller.
Scott Turow
#70. Nobody ever gets what they want when it comes to love.
Scott Turow
#71. alter kocker like me. Street-word is Hal hired Coral
Scott Turow
#72. The years roll on and life seems like this more and more, that choices don't really exit in the way I thought they would when I was a child and expected the regal power of adulthood to provide clarity and insight.
Scott Turow
#73. 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.
Scott Turow
#74. It was crime at its purest, in which empathy, that most fundamental aspect of human morality, evaporated and another being became only a target for untamed fantasy.
Scott Turow
#75. lawyer by training, Kajevic had the same talent as Hitler, making his gargantuan self-importance a proxy for his country's and his rantings the voice of his people's long-suppressed rage.
Scott Turow
#76. I practise law almost every day. Exclusively criminal work these days.
Scott Turow
#77. For all of my success, in looking back I couldn't identify a moment when, at core, I had felt fully at home with myself. My
Scott Turow
#78. The great break of my literary career was going to law school.
Scott Turow
#79. I always say, and I mean it, that the great break of my literary career was when I went to law school.
Scott Turow
#80. 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.
Scott Turow
#81. 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
#82. I am a big believer in the fact that all authors really write only one book.
Scott Turow
#83. 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
#84. 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.
Scott Turow
#85. 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
#86. Was love worth not having the life you wanted?
Scott Turow
#87. Life is simply experience; for reasons not readily discerned, we attempt to go on.
Scott Turow
#88. I write based on powerful inner impulses, and those seem to shift over time.
Scott Turow
#89. Libraries function as crucial technology hubs, not merely for free Web access, but those who need computer training and assistance. Library business centers help support entrepreneurship and retraining.
Scott Turow
#90. 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
#91. 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.
Scott Turow
#92. 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.
Scott Turow
#93. offering silent tribute to the unwillingness of any bureaucracy to go out of business. By
Scott Turow
#94. 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
#95. 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
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