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

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

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

Basbanes makes you love books.

I really do believe that chance favours a prepared mind. Wallace Stegner, who was one of my teachers when I was at Stanford, preached that writing a novel is not something that can be done in a sprint. That it's a marathon. You have to pace yourself. He himself wrote two pages every day and gave himself a day off at Christmas. His argument was at the end of a year, no matter what, you'd got 700 pages and that there's got to be something worth keeping.

People are offering competing visions of what happened in the past. And the justice system is willing to accept either of those competing visions and to impose consequences as a result. When you think of it that way, it's a little bit startling, because we want to believe that there is one truth and, therefore, one justice, whereas, if you have practiced law as long as I have, you realize that there is actually a range of acceptable outcomes.

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