Quotes from William Landay

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.

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

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

The interior of a teenager's mind is an endless war between Stupid and Clever.

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.

the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

don't worry about how things look. People are going to think whatever they think. To hell with 'em. You can't worry about it.

We are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and have been since we began drawing on cave walls.

I rather doubt he had the sense to see the truth: that there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law's little binary distinctions-guilty/innocent, criminal/victim-cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel.

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.

But sometimes you can't figure everything out because you can't ever really understand other people. You can't understand why they do what they do. You just have to accept a little mystery, Ben. People are mysterious, the world is mysterious. You can't know everything. You're not supposed to. This isn't a history book. It's just the world. It's a messy place.

but good friendships require complementary personalities, not identical ones.

At seventeen, I knew: my entire childhood had been just a prelude to this girl. I had never felt anything like it, and still haven't. I felt changed by her, physically. I became a different person, myself, the person I am now. And everything that came after-my family, my home, our entire life together-was a gift she gave me.

I admit--no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed-

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

But then, we all tell ourselves stories about ourselves. The money man tells himself that by getting rich he is actually enriching others, the artist tells himself that his creations are things of deathless beauty, the soldier tells himself he is on the side of the angels.

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

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

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....

I have an idea that this 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.

Every father knows the disconcerting when you see your child as a weird, distorted double of yourself. It is as if for a moment your identities overlap. You see an idea, a conception of your boyish inner self...made real and flesh. He is you restarted, rewound; at the same time he is as foreign and unknowable as any other person.

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.

Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you—and it will find you.

It was as if there was a place called After, and if I could just push my family across to that shore, then everything would be all right. There would be time for all these "soft" problems in the land of After.