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Scott Turow

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Famous Scott Turow Quotes

“Wanna dance?" she asked. "I think they're playing our song." "Oh yeah? What's that?" "The hokey-pokey." "No shit." "Sure," she said, "don't you hear it?" She left her bikini top on, but she removed the bottom and then wrestled off my trunks. She held our suits in one hand and with the other grabbed hold of the horn of plenty. "Salve work?" she asked. "Miracle drug," I said "And how to you do the hokey-pokey?" she asked. "I forget." "You put your right foot in." "Right." "You put your right foot out." "Good." "You put your right foot in and you shake it all about." "Great. What's next?" she asked and kissed me sweetly. "After the foot?”

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Book:Pleading Guilty
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“Justice is good in its own right and makes life among other people more dependable. Yet Stern accepted long ago that even perfect justice will not change who we are. The law is erected on many fictions and perhaps the falsest one of all is that humans, in the end, are rational. Without doubt, our life--so far as we can tell--is one of cause and effect. That is what science depends on. But our most intimate decisions are rarely based on the kinds of calculations of pluses and minuses Jeremy Bentham, or the free-market economists for that matter, have wanted to believe in. We are fundamentally emotional creatures. In the most consequential matters, we answer faithfully to the heart's cry, not the law's.”

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Book:The Last Trial
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“After all these weeks, after all of this, I feel that I am finally going to pieces, and I find, stunningly, that as I turn about in the street, I am praying, a habit of my childhood, when I would try to cover my bets with a God in whom I knew I did not much believe. And now, dear God, I think, dear God in whom I do not believe, I pray you to stop this, for I am deathly frightened. Dear God, I smell my fear, with an oder as distinct as ozone on the air after a lightening flash. I feel fear so palpable it has a color, an oozing fiery red, and I feel it pitifully in my bones, which ache. My pain is so extreme that I can barely move down this hot avenue, and for a moment cannot, as my backbone bows with fear, as if a smelted rod, red-hot and livid, had been laid there. Dear God, dear God, I am in agony and fear, and whatever I may have done to make you bring this down upon me, release me, please, I pray, release me. Release me. Dear God in whom I do not believe, dear God, let me go free.”

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Book:Presumed Innocent
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“The law, for all its failings, has a noble goal - to make the little bit of life that people can actually control more just. We can't end disease or natural disasters, but we can devise rules for our dealings with one another that fairly weigh the rights and needs of everyone, and which, therefore, reflect our best vision of ourselves.”

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Author:Scott Turow
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“I really do believe that chance favours a prepared mind. Wallace Stegner, who was one of my teachers when I was at Stanford, preached that writing a novel is not something that can be done in a sprint. That it's a marathon. You have to pace yourself. He himself wrote two pages every day and gave himself a day off at Christmas. His argument was at the end of a year, no matter what, you'd got 700 pages and that there's got to be something worth keeping.”

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Author:Scott Turow
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“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.”

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Author:Scott Turow
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“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.”

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Author:Scott Turow
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