Quotes from John Grisham

There are three types of words: words we all know, words we should know, and words nobody knows. Don't use the third category.

You burn a man's pickup, and he's ready for war.

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

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.

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

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'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.

Charlottesville is a quiet town with friendly people, good schools, lots of churches, parks, and a bustling, growing community that more or less revolves around one of the country's great public universities. Volunteerism is rampant, and dozens of nonprofits hustle about, solving problems and helping those in need.

In little pockets of conversation, old men were telling stories of ancient floods. Women were talking of about how much rain there'd been in other towns -- Paragould, Lepanto, and Manila.

We are extremely private, and we really got sort of ambushed by the notoriety.

I'm a Christian, and those beliefs occasionally come out in the books.

I practiced law for 10 years, and I always admired the lawyers who were not afraid to take unpopular cases. And I never had the guts to do that. I was playing it safe. I was trying to make a living. And I just never volunteered for a really tough case, and there were some of them I should've taken. And I admired the lawyers who did.

Critics should find meaningful work.

I like to start with the first chapter, end with chapter 40. No flashbacks, nothing fancy, just a direct storytelling.

Most men cannot write good sex. I tried one time years ago and showed it to my wife, and she felt like laughing.

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

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.

I had never written anything. And I had never studied writing. So my motives were pure: I had a great story... a courtroom drama that I sort of fictionalized, and that became 'A Time to Kill.'

When you work at street level you never know who's going to walk through your door.

After I'd been a lawyer for about five or six years, I started playing around with fiction.

And they drank heavily, partied with great enthusiasm, and relished the drug culture; they moved in and out and slept around, and this was okay because they defined their own morality. They were fighting for the Mexicans and the redwoods, dammit! They had to be good people!

The mother of a trophy wife is not automatically a trophy mother-in-law.

life is too short to despise people who simply can't help what they've done.

Make friends with fear, Lucien always said, because it will not go away, and it will destroy you if left uncontrolled.