Basbanes makes you love books.

I tend to write in the mornings.

Postmodernism cost literature its audience.

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

The Guild is the authoritative voice of American writers.

People talk of me as being the inventor of the legal thriller.

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

I practise law almost every day. Exclusively criminal work these days.

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

I write based on powerful inner impulses, and those seem to shift over time.

I am a big believer in the fact that all authors really write only one book.

I spent four of my five years at Stanford writing a novel I was unable to sell.

That led me to say that when push comes to shove, I'm against capital punishment.

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

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

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

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

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

If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, ther would be no need for fiction.

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

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

If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction.

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

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

I am a law student in my first year at the law, and there are many moments when I am simply a mess.

I always say, and I mean it, that the great break of my literary career was when I went to law school.

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

Amazon can't be all good or all bad. I don't think that everything they do is evil; they've given a lot of authors access.

'Torts' more or less means 'wrongs'...One of my friends said that Torts is the course which proves that your mother was right.

I count myself as one of millions of Americans whose life simply would not be the same without the libraries that supported my learning.

I think lawyers have a fidelity to the system itself that's always got to be with them, and indeed, most of the defense lawyers I know observe that.

I was one of those kids who never wanted to be anything but a novelist. And I don't know a lot of people who truly live the life that they dreamed of.

'Black Beauty,' by Anna Sewell, remains a star-dusted memory because my mom read it aloud to my sister and me at night for months. I was no more than 7.

Only in the mystery novel are we delivered final and unquestionable solutions. The joke to me is that fiction gives you a truth that reality can't deliver.

Certainly, when I was a boy, people liked to believe that lawyers were kind of pillars of goodness of the likes of Atticus Finch in 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

I love criminal law. It must be the Dostoyevskian streak in me. I'm fascinated by the accumulation of forces that make people behave in ways that everybody else hates.

I read little nonfiction, but I have no boundaries about the fiction I relish. The only unfailing criterion is that I can hitch my heart to the imagined world and read on.

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.

I hate second-guessing other lawyers because I know that I've tried and lost cases, and somebody could sit there and say, 'Should have done it this way,' and they'd have been right.

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.

I trained as a writer before I became a lawyer. I was headed for a life as an English professor, but that just wasn't me. I'm not a scholar; I didn't have a scholar's attitude toward literature.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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