I tend to start with a kernel, a vague concept, and just begin to write things down - notes about a character, lines of dialogue, descriptive passages about a place. One idea fires another. I do that for about a year. By then there's a story, and I'll go on to a complete first draft that sews many of those ragtag pieces together.

Scott Turow

Categorized in : Place Down Character Together

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

curiosity offering thinking

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

pillars guarantees-that democracy

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

library millions

'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

mother said mean

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

Scott Turow

life-is goes-on reason

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

support technology business

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

pills drug reading

Who are we but the stories we tell about ourselves, particularly if we accept them?

Scott Turow

stories believe

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

Scott Turow

burden-of-proof proof burden

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

Scott Turow

dignity absence courage

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

Scott Turow

love-and-death unrequited-love together

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.

Scott Turow

writing teacher believe

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

kids children school

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

persistence people art

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.

Scott Turow

believe past thinking

I have a hard time isolating what it is in myself that makes me so fascinated with the theme of identity, because I came from a normal upper middle-class family. And yet, as I look back at my books, the uses of power, issues of identity, they have - it's recurrent. It happens again and again.

Scott Turow

hard-times identity book

There cannot be any greater challenge to the law than trying to adjudicate mass crimes like war crimes.

Scott Turow

challenges trying war

The Guild is the authoritative voice of American writers.

Scott Turow

guilds american-writer voice

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

unique mind way

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

Scott Turow

remember book firsts