Scott Turow Quotes

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

I think that the mark of a great book is that it will meet you wherever you're at and you'll feel and experience something new and different each time you read it.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.

the autobiography is at one and the same time a single element in the series of the writer's created works and an interpretation of the whole series.

How I work is that I write a story I'd like to read. Then you fly to Paris or Sydney and the interviewers talk about the greater significance of your work.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

I never like to put myself in the stories; in 'Lost in the City,' there are fourteen stories, and there's only one, 'The First Day,' about a little girl going to school, that has anything to do with me.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.

The first book you write because of the way it makes you feel. The second one you can't help but wonder how it's going to make the reader feel.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

There are bits of me in all my characters.

There is always going to be a little bit of me in each character.

I think the last thing you want to do as a writer, as a storyteller, is to create indifference. I don't necessarily go out of my way to provoke, but I would much rather have a song that triggers a whole myriad of reactions than a song that inspires a shrug of the shoulder.

When I'm sitting writing, I know that something works if I've made myself cry, or laugh, or have a visceral emotion.

Because I write prose, when I sat down to write a comic, it feels like my brain's working differently. It actually feels like different bits of my head are springing into action.

My job is to form the people, the story, the sentences. Every reader will bring their own life and their own history to the story and shape it accordingly. I guess you can say it's like I am sending them a letter.

My job as an author - at least the way I think of it - is to make a story that is coded and puzzling enough to entice conversation and interpretation, but also to do the opposite: to make some things clear so that it is meaningful in some way, not just a random assemblage of ideas.

I like to think I put some of myself in every character.

I'm not going to get into the writer's skills or what he was trying to portray because that's not fair. I can only say what I felt was trying to be portrayed there.

I never sit down to write anything personal unless I know the subject is going to go beyond my own experience and address something larger and more universal.