Top 40 Scott Turow Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Who are we but the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and believe?”

— Scott Turow

2. “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

3. “Courage is not the absence of fear but the ability to carry on with dignity in spite of it.”

— Scott Turow

4. “Libraries function as crucial technology hubs, not merely for free Web access, but for those who need computer training and assistance. Library business centers help support entrepreneurship and retraining.”

— 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. “My client may deserve serious punishment, but first prove that is the case. And remember at all times that he is a human being, which means he must be treated with minimum standards of decency, because doing so redeems not only him but you.”

— Scott Turow

7. “It was something like stirring concrete with my eyelashes.”

— Scott Turow

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

— Scott Turow

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

— Scott Turow

10. “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

11. “Postmodernism cost literature its audience.”

— Scott Turow

12. “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

13. “Nobody ever gets what they want when it comes to love.”

— Scott Turow

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

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

— Scott Turow

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

— Scott Turow

19. “Life is simply experience; for reasons not readily discerned, we attempt to go on.”

— Scott Turow

20. “Accept dear God the soul of Dixon Hartnell, who made his own amends and who travelled his own way. He failed as we all fail, and perhaps more often than some. Yet he recognized fundamental things. Not that we are evil; for we are not. But that, by whatever name – self interest, impulse, anger, lust, or greed – we are inclined that way; and that it is our tragedy to know this can never change, our duty to try at every moment to overcome it; and our glory occasionally to succeed.”

— Scott Turow

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “The first time I remember really being excited about a book was The Count of Monte Cristo.”

— Scott Turow

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “Basbanes makes you love books.”

— Scott Turow

31. “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

32. “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

33. “I tend to write in the mornings.”

— Scott Turow

34. “If life’s lessons could be reduced to single sentences, ther would be no need for fiction.”

— Scott Turow

35. “Thus for me, the principal meaning of being a Jew was something people reliably held against me, a barrier to overcome.”

— Scott Turow

36. “The Guild is the authoritative voice of American writers.”

— Scott Turow

37. “Life, of course, is full of people you discover you like a lot and then never see again.”

— Scott Turow

38. “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

39. “That led me to say that when push comes to shove, I’m against capital punishment.”

— Scott Turow

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

— Scott Turow

41. “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

42. “People talk of me as being the inventor of the legal thriller.”

— Scott Turow

43. “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

44. “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

45. “Muriel never had had much concern about the arcane reasoning that emanated from appellate courts. The conflicts in the law that interested her were writ large – guilt or innocence, the rights of individuals against the rights of the community, the proper uses of power. The scrimshaw involved in etching decisions into words was largely decorative in her mind.”

— Scott Turow

46. “Was love worth not having the life you wanted?”

— Scott Turow

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

— Scott Turow