John Grisham Quotes - Page 2

There's always such a rush to judgment. It makes a fair trial hard to get.

One thing you really have to watch as a writer is getting on a soapbox or pulpit about anything. You don't want to alienate readers.

I've sold too many books to get good reviews anymore. There's a lot of jealousy, because [reviewers] think they can write a good novel or a best-seller and get frustrated when they can't. I've learned to despise them.

judge not that ye be not judged

I don't start a novel until I have lived with the story for awhile to the point of actually writing an outline and after a number of books I've learned that the more time I spend on the outline the easier the book is to write. And if I cheat on the outline I get in trouble with the book.

Still, something about writing made me spend large hours of my free time at my desk.

There are few writers who, if they publish anything, I am going to buy it: Ian McEwan, Scott Turow, Pat Conroy - he was a buddy of mine and I always read his stuff. Also: Harlan Coben, Elmore Leonard, John Le Carre, but he's pushing ninety.

Once again, I was reminded that Tally was the prettiest girl I'd ever met, and when she smiled at me my mind went blank. Once you've seen a pretty girl naked, you feel a certain attachment to her.

I earned my first steady paycheck watering rose bushes at a nursery for a dollar an hour.

My mum was never too keen on TV, so we kids all went to the library and got books out. Right from the start, I loved the works of Mark Twain. Every time I read about Tom Sawyer, I'd go out and do something low-level naughty, just like him.

Prisons are fascinating places, especially when the inmates are educated white-collar types.

The first thing my family did when we moved was join the local church. The second was to go to the library and get library cards.

It's as if we spend our entire lives avoiding Jell-O but it is always there at the end, waiting.

I'm not in favor of the death penalty. But I'm in favor of locking these people away in maximum security units where they can never get out. They can never escape. They can never be paroled. Lock the bad ones away. But you gotta rethink everybody else.

Death row is a nightmare to serial killers and ax murderers. For an innocent man, it's a life of mental torture that the human spirit is not equipped to survive.

Very few writers understand the complex history and maddening social order of the Mississippi Delta. For Steve Yarbrough, though, it's home turf. He is wickedly observant, funny, cynical, evocative, and he possesses a gift that cannot be taught: he can tell a story.

I seriously doubt I would ever have written the first story had I not been a lawyer. I never dreamed of being a writer. I wrote only after witnessing a trial.

More than 100 people have been sent to death row who were later exonerated because they weren't guilty or fairly tried. Most criminal defendants do not get adequate representation because there are not enough public defenders to represent them. There is a lot that is wrong.

How could homosexuals possibly srew up the sanctity of marriage any worse than heterosexuals?

Quite often I can be in a bookshop, standing beneath a great big picture of myself and paying for a book with a credit card clearly marked John Grisham, yet no one recognises me. I often say I'm a famous author in a country where no one reads.

I guess under the right circumstances, a man will do just about anything.

Please give me fifty more years of work and fun, then an instant death when I'm sleeping.

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.

I have learned not to read reviews. Period. And I hate reviewers. All of them, or at least all but two or three. Life is much simpler ignoring reviews and the nasty people who write them. Critics should find meaningful work.

I grew up in a very small, close-knit, Southern Baptist family, where everything was off-limits. So I couldn't wait to get to college and have some fun. And I did for the first two years. And I regret a lot of it, because my grades were in terrible shape.