John Grisham Quotes
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It's hard to read good fiction when I am writing, because if it is really good I catch myself sort of inadvertently imitating a great writer.
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I was a lawyer for 10 years, and several of my clients had the misfortune, through no fault of my own, of going to prison. I visited them occasionally.
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I'm not good at raising money. I don't like to raise money. It's been my experience that when I ask someone for money, it's not long before they return the favor.
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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.
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There are three types of words: words we all know, words we should know, and words nobody knows. Don't use the third category.
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I spend a lot of time outlining before I write the first word.
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I don't want to force my politics on my readers.
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I'm not itching to sue Amazon or Wal-Mart... they sell a lot of books. But the future is very uncertain with books.
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We are extremely private, and we really got sort of ambushed by the notoriety.
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I earned my first steady paycheck watering rose bushes at a nursery for a dollar an hour.
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I hate prologues because they're kind of gimmicks to suck you in.
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I can't change overnight into a serious literary author. You can't compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.
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Your brain is cooked when you write hard for three or four hours.
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After I'd been a lawyer for about five or six years, I started playing around with fiction.
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Prisons are fascinating places, especially when the inmates are educated white-collar types.
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Writing was not a childhood dream of mine. I do not recall longing to write as a student. I wasn't sure how to start.
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Keeping a guy in prison costs 50,000 bucks a year. Executing one costs a couple million.
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I always try to tell a good story, one with a compelling plot that will keep the pages turning. That is my first and primary goal. Sometimes I can tackle an issue-homelessness, tobacco litigation, insurance fraud, the death penalty-and wrap a good story around it.