Quotes from William Landay

narcissistic personality disorder. This is the one you probably know something about. Its primary characteristics are grandiosity and lack of empathy.

NPD is not a chemical imbalance. And it is not genetic. It is a complex of behaviors, a deeply ingrained habit.

At some point as adults we cease to be our parents' children and we become our children's parents instead. What

I used to wonder what it would be like if a magical amnesia descended and erased my mind completely, leaving only a body and some sort of blank self, all potential, all soft clay.

The girl was about to cry, which reminded me of the grown woman I had just left on the sidewalk also near tears. Jesus, there was no escaping them.

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 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." —JOHN F. WATKINS, Principles of Behaviorism (1913)

liberal, it turns out, is a conservative who's been indicted.

no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed...

And we would always be shaped by the experience, in ways we could not guess at the time.

But it is not enough to be told a word as big as that. You have to live with it, carry it around with you. You have to pace around and around it, see it from different angles, at different times of day, in different light, until you understand, until it enters you. You have to hold it inside yourself in secret for years, like the hideous stone inside a peach. How

Let us be practical in our expectations of the Criminal Law.… [For] we have merely to imagine, by some trick of time travel, meeting our earliest hominid ancestor, Adam, a proto-man, short of stature, luxuriantly furred, newly bipedal, foraging about on the African savannah three million or so years ago. Now, let us agree that we may pronounce whatever laws we like for this clever little creature, still it would be unwise to pet him.

He was just innocent. With the best intentions, he smashed people's lives and never lost a minute of sleep over it. He only went after bad guys, after all. That

Grand juries serve for months, and they figure out pretty quickly what the gig is all about: accuse, point your finger, name the wicked one. A

It is a childish realization, I admit—no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed—but after all, we were children.

Forbidding as the school was, at least I had a new friend. Jeff and I hit it off right away. We were inseparable. It was one of those childhood friendships that was so natural and uncomplicated, we seemed to discover it more than we created it. I have no adult friendships like the one I had with Jeff. I am sure I never will. Once we slip on the armor of adulthood, we lose the ability to form that kind of naive, unqualified connection.

you can love your child and still see his flaws. You have to see his flaws, otherwise how can you help him?

actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea—"the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

It is, of course, the last resort of a liar to challenge his inquisitor to call him a liar directly.

Anyway, the point is, I just think we flatter ourselves when we say we can engineer our kids to be this way or that way. It's mostly just hardwired.

But things were racing too fast to linger over the past or future. There was only now.

It is a common architectural strategy to build courtrooms without windows, to enhance the effect of a chamber isolated from the everyday world, a theater for the great and timeless work of the law.

I don't ever write with a particular audience in mind. I just write books that please me.

I'm a bit of a tech geek myself.