Poverty is a great equalizer.
It’s a game. We tax lawyers teach the rich how to play it so they can stay rich-and the IRS keeps changing the rules so we can keep getting rich teaching them.
Writing’s still the most difficult job I’ve ever had – but it’s worth it.
The worst letters come from retired high school English teachers. They will literally take a book and pick it to pieces and send me 14 pages of notes.
I don’t usually eat breakfast. I prefer to be asleep during the hours that it is served.
And that’s the mission of The Innocence Project in New York, is to exonerate people who have been wrongfully convicted, and also work from a policy angle with Congress and state legislatures to prevent future wrongful convictions.
After I’d been a lawyer for about five or six years, I started playing around with fiction.
There’s always such a rush to judgment. It makes a fair trial hard to get.
I don’t want to force my politics on my readers.
Ten years from now I plan to be sitting here, looking out over my land. I hope I’ll be writing books, but if not, I’ll be on my pond fishing with my kids. I feel like the luckiest guy I know.
I guess under the right circumstances, a man will do just about anything.
Make friends with fear, Lucien always said, because it will not go away, and it will destroy you if left uncontrolled.
They say a woman marries a man with the belief she can change him, and she can’t. A man marries a woman with the belief that she won’t change, and she does.
You count the years until you get a varsity jersey, then you’re a hero, an idol, a cocky bastard because in this town you can do no wrong. You win and win and you’re the king of your own little world, then poof, it’s gone. You play your last game and everybody cries. You can’t believe it’s over. Then another team comes right behind you and you’re forgotten.
I’ve never understood people who grind through a book they don’t really like, determined to finish it for some unknown reason.
Appalachia was Appalachia, regardless of boundaries someone had set an eternity ago. A land of breathtaking beauty, of steep hills and rolling mountains.
It takes just one, he says over and over. You hear that all the time in this business. One big case, and you can retire. That’s one reason lawyers do so many sleazy things, like full-color ads in the yellow pages, and billboards, and placards on city buses, and telephone solicitation. You hold your nose, ignore the stench of what you’re doing, ignore the snubs and snobbery of big-firm lawyers, because it takes only one.
I believe in God,” he said, truthfully but weakly. “It’s easy to say that,” she said, her words still slow and soft. “And I don’t doubt you. But saying is one thing, living is another matter.
And until we can see each other as equals, justice is never going to be even-handed. It will remain nothing more than a reflection of our own prejudices.
Like so many, this trial is not about the truth; it’s about winning.