Top 40 William Landay Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We move through time like a man in a rowboat, looking back even as we move forward.”

— William Landay

2. “Predisposition is not predestination.”

— William Landay

3. “Genes are not simple triggers. No one is hardwired to commit murder or any other crime. Our actions are always the result of stupendously complex gene-environment interactions, and environment is likely to remain the more important influence by far.”

— William Landay

4. “Probably careful plotting reflects my personality. I am meticulous by nature. I can’t imagine speed-writing anything that happens to pop into my head.”

— William Landay

5. “An emotion is a thought, yes, an idea, but it is also a sensation, an ache in your body. Desire, love, hate, fear, repulsion – you feel these things in your muscle and bones, not just in your mind.”

— William Landay

6. “You know, being confident isn’t the same as being right.”

— William Landay

7. “You have to follow your intuition. That is what expertise is: all the experience, the cases won and lost, the painful mistakes, all the technical details you learn by rote repetition, over time these things leave you with an instinctive sense of your craft. A “gut” for it.”

— William Landay

8. “I’m a bit of a tech geek myself.”

— William Landay

9. “School isn’t supposed to be dangerous. It’s not a place they should be afraid of. It’s their second home. It’s where they spend most of their waking hours.”

— William Landay

10. “There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea – the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.”

— William Landay

11. “Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you – and it will find you.”

— William Landay

12. “Good stories are driven by conflict, tension, and high stakes.”

— William Landay

13. “The interior of a teenager’s mind is an endless war between Stupid and Clever.”

— William Landay

14. “A jury verdict is just a guess – a well-intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote.”

— William Landay

15. “There is no absolute beginning to any story, after all. There is only the moment you begin watching.”

— William Landay

16. “I have an idea that is is what enduring love really means, Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known.”

— William Landay

17. “Confirmation bias is the tendency to see things in your environment that confirm your preconceived ideas and not see things that conflict with what you already believe. I think maybe something like that happens with kids. You see what you want to see.”

— William Landay

18. “It turns out, you can get used to almost anything. What one day seems a shocking, unbearable outrage over time comes to seem ordinary, unremarkable.”

— William Landay

19. “The human element in any system is always prone to error. Why should the courts be any different? They are not. Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance...”

— William Landay

20. “A liberal, it turns out, is a conservative who’s been indicted.”

— William Landay

21. “I don’t ever write with a particular audience in mind. I just write books that please me.”

— William Landay

22. “The truth is, the best win-lost records are not built on great trial work. They are built on cherry-picking only the strongest cases for trial and pleading out the rest, regardless of the right and wrong of it.”

— William Landay

23. “Out popped Paul Duffy, in plain clothes except for a state police windbreaker and a badge clipped to his belt. He looked at me – I think by now I had dropped the bat to my side, at least, though I must have looked ridiculous anyway – and he raised his eyebrows. ‘Get back in the house, Babe Ruth.”

— William Landay

24. “I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to listen. You know, being confident isn’t the same as being right.”

— William Landay

25. “I love sports, as all Bostonians seem to. I love books and movies, as all writers seem to.”

— William Landay

26. “Confirmation bias is the tendency to see things in your environment that confirm your preconceived ideas and not see things that conflict with what you already believe.”

— William Landay

27. “We both love him. I’m just saying, you can love your child and still see his flaws. You have to see his flaws, otherwise how can you help him?”

— William Landay

28. “A good marriage drags a long tail of memory behind it. A single word or gesture, a tone of voice can conjure up so many remembrances.”

— William Landay

29. “I can’t say that I ever actually decided to become a writer. It kind of snuck up on me.”

— William Landay

30. “Studies have shown that fathers of murdered children often die within a few years of the murder, often of heart failure. Really, they die of grief.”

— William Landay

31. “Before, she had this way of focusing on whomever she spoke to, so that you felt you were the most impossibly captivating person in the room; now, her eyes wandered and she seemed not to be in the room herself.”

— William Landay

32. “All they got locked up in this hole is my body. That’s all they got, my body, not me. I’m everywhere, see? Everywhere you look, junior, everywhere you go.”

— William Landay

33. “You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time.”

— William Landay

34. “Well, I outline fanatically. I am a long thinker and a slow writer, though I am trying to get faster.”

— William Landay

35. “I am interested in computers and technology, and art, photography, and design.”

— William Landay

36. “There are many more ways to be attractive than to be beautiful.”

— William Landay

37. “Crime and legal stories, broadly speaking, are just where my interest happens to lie.”

— William Landay

38. “Somewhere she had learned that if an interviewer remains silent, the interviewee will rush to fill the silence.”

— William Landay

39. “Nobody gets to you without going through me – and nobody’s getting through me.”

— William Landay

40. “I have in mind an experiment. Take an infant – regardless of ancestry, race, talent, or predilection, so long as he is essentially healthy – and I will make of him whatever you like. I will produce an artist, soldier, doctor, lawyer, priest; or I will raise him to be a thief. You may decide. The infant is equally capable of all these things. All that is required is training, time, and a properly controlled environment.”

— William Landay

41. “In small letters, now a little blurry, it read Omnia mea mecum porto, Latin for “All that is mine I carry with me.”

— William Landay

42. “Like I knew it was bad. And there were these posters.”

— William Landay

43. “Don’t face up to your problems with honesty and courage. That’s just crazy. You’re better off burying them under an avalanche of sarcasm.”

— William Landay