Scott Turow Quotes (32 Quotes)


    In the wake of the Sixties they began to celebrate diversity and pluralism.


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

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

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


    It's the inability of the laws and institutions to accommodate these fine differences in people that has always provided a theme for me.


    Presumed Innocent was filmed for the movies and The Burden of Proof was filmed for TV.

    As a graduate student and a writing fellow, innovation was all. As a trial lawyer, accessibility was everything.

    Generally speaking most of the people I saw who were irretrievably violent, were people who had had violence done to them as children.

    For people like me, people of a certain privilege, the sixties were extremely important in shaping our sense of humanity.

    Even killers recognize that some people are sort of programmed to do mayhem.

    In the broadest terms it is, like much literature, about life and death.

    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.

    I did not realize how bad, how desperately bad the plight of the black urban poor had become.

    Brian Dugan's crimes -- and the murder of Jeanine was not the only one -- are horrific. But I hope that whoever ultimately decides Brian Dugan's fate bears in mind that he also had the moral courage to accept responsibility for a crime he alone committed, even though he knew that the blame had fallen elsewhere. In so doing he set in motion the chain of events that ultimately allowed two innocent men who had been sentenced to death to be restored to freedom. Dugan's evil deeds are extraordinary and repugnant, but his courage also was extraordinary.

    You can't say there's going to be no death penalty and then say we can't have severe conditions of confinement.

    Just because it's a mystery, it doesn't have to be mindless.

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

    The embrace of plot has allowed something like the Oprah book club phenomenon to emerge.

    I then became a defense lawyer and saw the system go wrong, saw innocent people convicted and sentenced to death, and people who were certainly guilty, but who had not committed crimes as grave as the punishment.

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

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

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

    I always say that I don't criticize anybody's position on the death penalty because I've held all of them.

    I'm not a scholar, I didn't have a scholar's attitude toward literature.

    It turned out people were intensely curious about what actually goes on in courtrooms, and that Americans were deeply interested in law.

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

    Americans stopped believing in the melting pot and in universal American values.

    I think the first serious novel that interested me was The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane.

    Postmodernism cost literature its audience.

    De Tocqueville talked about the legalistic bent of American culture but, whatever that was, it became accentuated in the latter part of the twentieth century.


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