YouSaid · the spoken record
Andrew Vachss
- lines on the record
- 70
- first
- 2022-02-22
- most recent
- 2022-02-22
- sittings or episodes
- 1
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- podcast
Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections
“Indeed, that's worshiping the wrong God. We still have to define family operationally, not biologically. The dog has puppies. You don't say it's a mother, it's what it does that makes it a mother. Or father, or brother or sister. It's behavior that's the truth”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not willing to pay what it costs. To do the right thing because people are always willing to do the right thing risk free.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember speaking to so many kids. And the matter the kids race or creed or color or age or social background. They all said the same kind of thing. They had to know. It wasn't that much of a secret behind those closed doors. I can understand my neighbors not knowing. I can understand my school teachers not know. My doctor not know. They had to know. I hear that over and over again. I'm not saying there are no exceptions, but by and large, I believe that they know.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't. The only person who had a plane was the person that did it. This wasn't part of any lordly plan to make you soft or anybody else suffer. Humans do that”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly the way you should be thinking. What could you have done without it? It's not like, oh, thank God this was all part of some design or plan.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some people overcome that and achieve wonderful things. It doesn't mean that they should have carried that weight or had that handicap”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They turn it completely insane. But there is an impact. And for all those people to say there's not an impact, see, you're the one that they cite all the time. Or how bad could it be? Look at Oprah. She's rich. She's successful. She's famous. She's popular. How bad could it really be?”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was my attempt to talk directly to people on two levels. So it's a children's book for adults. You can read it or your child can read it or you can read it to your child. And it's what I hope is a message of hope instead of it being a dark side sort of look. It's the wonderful potential that all children are. Another chance for all of us to make advances that we haven't made.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that wasn't. I didn't cold bloodily say, well, I'm going to write books and that's going to fund the law practice. You have to be massively egotistical human being to think that.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but I'm not an egotistical enough to think I can make a living writing books either. I mean, it sort of came about by accident. It's worked out much better than I dreamed of.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I spent the rest of my writing career and virtually all the rest of my career on the dark side. And that's what children ought to me. Another chance for our whole species to finally get it right.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If that many people simply wrote a letter to Congress saying, unless you pass this bill, I'm going to remember your name in two years or four years, whatever it takes. Okay? That's it. But we'll overcome there. See, they don't have the courage of their convictions. Nobody's got courage saying, I don't want this bill passed.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only way to turn around is with force. If just the number, just the number, if the number of people who watch your show every day,”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't even believe that you. Has it passed yet? It is a simple thing to do, and yet that's a constituency that doesn't vote. Jama listeners have lobbies. They have distinctive lobbies. They have fundraisers. They back political candidates, they impact on legislation. As an organized group, children don't. Everybody claims to speak for children, which is why you notice I don't They're the voice of children. But it's all over the place. It isn't united. It isn't focused. It isn't tight.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once people's conscience raises their turn, right? Okay, so you have this bill, right, that they actually call the Oprah Bill. It's in Congress right now. What could be a simpler bill? It's a very simple bill. All this bill says is that if you're convicted of a crime against the child, you go on a national registry so that if you hire a babysitter or somebody in a daycare center or a nursery or a karate instructor or whatever, you can be assured that the person to whom you've entrusted your child has not previously been convicted of hurting a child. Is that an outrageous law?”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I say it with sarcasm. I say it out of contempt. I say it because that's the damn law. If a guy has sex with a little five-year-old girl down the street, everybody agrees he's a pervert. Let him do it to his own five-year-old daughter. Everybody wants to call in the therapist. We don't call him a rapist anymore. We call him victim of family dysfunction. That's my problem with it. I say it with contempt. I think what's the worst crime? What's the worst crime? And yet incest is the crime for which you're least likely, least likely to go to jail in this country.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those are the children who've been used and abused by their own and confused about their place in the whole world and who have been quiet, who've been carrying the pain in their own hearts.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was raised with that, that children were there to be protected, but I didn't have that from my parents. It was later on when I saw the incredibly grotesque and horrible and for-profit things people did to children that I reached my own motivation.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, people that were raised very close to me, I certainly knew they were abused, but I need to explain to you that I thought kids getting beat up was not so unusual. I thought I was the unusual kid because nothing like that could ever happen to me. My dad is a huge guy. He played football against Vincent Lombardy back in the days when clubs guys were playing in college. And it was the war that caused him a chance a professional football career. He's 70 years old. He'll still go clean at a bar. And he never, ever would think about hitting a child. And I saw him hit plenty of people. It wasn't like my father was a Quaker. Wouldn't hit a child.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple of things really. That was something I'm not really sure about some medical thing early on, then I got hit with an object when I was outside the house and it kind of tore the muscles in.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Takes me into the hospital. Darkness says, I can fix that because it's going to leave a hell of a scar. Her mother grabs my face and says, You think he's going to be a model? She's a very tough lady”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to appreciate that. Mom, you know My mother was one of the toughest people I ever met. She had to raise me by herself to start off because my dad was busy killing Nazis and my mother was a teenager. And she was determined because of all the bogus advice she got from her friends that she didn't want to raise a sister, you know. So, my mother would do things like, well, I don't know if you can see this on camera, you probably don't want to, but the tip of the finger got chopped. I caught it in the steel door, and the tip came off. My mother seized that, picks up the tip of the finger, goes in the house, gets some ice, puts it there, smashes it up, puts it back on, wraps it real tight, says, you know, people are watching, I hope you're not going to cry.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't buy the idea that you have to treat the entire family unit as though there's some disease got loose, as opposed to the acts of a perpetrator.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone has to decide with the child. It's for damn sure the child won't break the cycle as a child unassisted. You can't. Once the choices are made, I think you can break the cycle. But breaking the cycle sometimes requires breaking some necks, breaking some chains, breaking things out of your life.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have family, my own family, that's not biologically related to me, but they are my family in every truer sense of the word. And I have people who are biologically related to me with whom I have no contact whatsoever, and that's fine with me too.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree with you. It never makes sense to me that people talk about preserving the family unit as a way of letting abusers run amok.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think I would sure. I mean, that's the model, isn't it? That you work in the DA's office for 15 years and you end up under defense bar. And I'm not knocking. I'm not saying that it's wrong. I'm just saying for me personally, for my own internal reasons, I wouldn't be able to do it.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The system is that you're supposed to provide a trial for somebody. You're not supposed to be the judge. That's up to a jury. And if you couldn't defend somebody you knew to be guilty, there'd be a lot of people on unemployment. I mean, lots of time you're not deluded about a person's guilt or innocence. You go through the dance anyway. I don't want to do that because I'm too eagotistical. I really think by now I've gotten pretty good at it. And I think if I defended such people, I would get off. I don't think that such a wonderful system. I think I would be successful”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did do one years and years ago when my belief system was different. I defended a guy who was involved in incest with his daughter and said all the right things, talked all the right talk. He's so sorry. He feels like killing himself. He'll do anything to make it up to the girl. He's going to formally apologize to everything perfect. And we did defend him. And in the middle of the case, it didn't go to trial. He was going to plead guilty. That was part of the deal. He was going to admit everything he did. In the middle of the case, it developed that he had what he called a relationship with some other young girl. And that was the last time I even listened to this cycle babble about killing and forgiveness. Because this guy was, believe me, this guy could have sold used cars in the desert. He was very good, very smooth, very slick.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay. Because that cachet being on death row is like an important thing. It's racially, culturally, economically, and class biased. It's almost never utilized. And when you add all of that up to the fact that you can make no pun intended a fatal mistake if you're going to kill people, I can't say it works for me. Lifetime incapacitation does. Genuine life without parole, that does work for me. Okay.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do it in a very ritualistic way, that entertains freaks. It takes forever to do it. An average of 13 years to kill a human being”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was very helpful to see beneath the mask and to see the monster that's really there. But he said it for his own reasons like they all do.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I'm saying that they all know he didn't know he was evil. He knew that he got caught. He knew he needed a fancy line of rhetoric to extend his life, which he went to, but he never saw himself as he portrayed himself.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could be a very successful salesman doing that. There's lots of things you could do doing that. You don't have to become a serial killer or a multiple rapist, a person who tortures children. However, should you find yourself bent in that direction, there's nothing to impede you No check. There's no ethical or moral controls or boundaries on you. Those people that we're talking about that I've met, there is no sense of boundary. There's a sense of personal safety, but that's it.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You torture a child in his or her own home so that, or by his own caretakers, so that that child believes that everything's backwards. The people who are constituted by all the laws pick the laws of God, the laws of nature, the laws of man, they're all violated when you taught your own child. Netchawn believes everything here is all I can trust, that I'll fill nobody's pain but my own because nobody ever felt it for me. That's how you get associate. But not all sociopaths turn predatory. So she put it. How can I say this? To be a sociopath means you have no empathy. You feel only your own feelings.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I knew that's the Rosetta Stone to humankind If we knew why you can take two children and torture one worse than you get in a POW camp and have that one become a serial killer, that's a direct result. And treat another child worse and have that child grow up to become a healer. We know all the answers. We don't. This is how much I know so far. We know the formula to make a monster.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a line that you cross, and I can't say it's chronological. It happens at different places for different people But when you know what you're doing and you choose to do it, not only without regard to human pain, but because you're excited and entranced by human pain, I'm willing to say that's even.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The choice of conduct is how I define evil. I would not take a nine year old kid who sexually attacks a five-year-old in direct imitation. Of what's happened to him was trying to escape his own sense of powerlessness And become empowered. I would not say that's an evil”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the person who shows that they are calcified Insistent, chronic, repetitive, escalative in their offenses. Kind of people who were constantly letting out of jail to torture more children? Identifies him or herself or herself by conduct. Once that conduct is clear to us, we have a moral obligation to our species to incarcerate them for life.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What would you do with toxic waste? What would you do with anything that was dangerous to human beings and couldn't be recycled?”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they work very carefully. Predators use camouflage as one of the techniques. Most of the danger to children in this country comes from people known to the child. The danger from a stranger is exaggerated by the media. I'm not saying it doesn't exist and it doesn't happen, but by and large, the least safe place for a child is his own home.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what happens with people like this? Pain is part of their enjoyment to the sexual sadist without pain, without evidence of pain, just no fun.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As part of the Don't tell me about denial Because that's part of the psycho babble. Guy says, I didn't molest my daughter. He's not in denial. He's lying.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can help those people to the extent that psychiatrists got an answer for their particular disorder. So we're not very good with paranoid schizophrenics when it comes to parenting. We're quite good with obsessive compulsives. Category 3 is where me and the whole rest of this business part company, people who are evil, people who hurt children for their own pleasure and or their own profit. Those people don't belong on the same planet with the rest of us, and they don't belong in the same room when you're talking about rehabilitation”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who are inadequate Simply don't know how to parent. A 12 year old girl with a baby of her own She can't distinguish that baby from a doll that's supposed to make her happy. Rather than something she's supposed to say Folks like that benefit immeasurably from what you like to call rehabilitation. We get beautiful bang for the buck with them. We get enormously positive results. There's people who neglect their children and abuse their children because they don't have the means or the resources. Or they don't have the knowledge, or they don't have the support. We can do wonderful things with them. Second category is people who are crazy. I mean, card carrying crazy, not crap like pedophilia, real paranoid schizophrenic crazy. Howling at the moon crazy.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never met a child molester yet who didn't identify a source of love in the child and threaten it against disclosure. They all really act the same, they may be of different heights and weights, different colors, different ages. They all act the same.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See, that's the camouflage of the perpetrator in that dynamic. He says to the little girl, if you tell mommy, it'll really hurt her. She's real sick, she might die if you tell her.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I look at the individuals, not the offense, but based on what I've done in 25 years, I will tell you that there's not only people we shouldn't forgive, but we forgive them at our peril. You forgive them somebody else pays for it.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The penal law is a little crazy about that. You know what I'm saying? If somebody comes up to you and says, give me your money. And you say no The whip you and take the money? The law says it's armed robbery. Someone comes up to you, sticks a gun in your face, give me your money. You say, sure, take the money.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but I don't see a real distance between sodomizing your own baby and molesting your own child. I don't see a big difference.”
2022-02-22 · The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast · Conversations With Oprah: Andrew Vachss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source