John Grisham Quotes

There's still a great deal of bias about homosexuality.

I think stupid people are surprised that I'm Australian. It's a small-minded; we live in a global community, but I suppose some people still are small-minded.

Indeed, there are so many prejudices against everyday middle-class values on college campuses, and serving in the military and being pro-American just seems to be one of them.

But it's amazing how many people think that gay men should slink off into the shadows when it comes to having friendships with children.

There are a lot of myths about gay people.

There is a misconception that I've experienced in my life about people that live in the South. I got sent away to school in Connecticut in the late Eighties, and kids were honestly asking me, 'Do people there wear shoes?'

With any sort of minority, issues of ostracization or misrepresentation are clearly rampant. It's just so deeply rooted in our culture, and there are so many levels that it trickles down from.

I was just trying to say that it's unnecessary; you don't need to label yourself. I guess it came off the wrong way, because then everyone labelled me as gay. That's not what I was trying to say. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course!

I hope we can dismantle the idea that the entire south is sitting on our porches spitting tobacco and hating gay people.

Didn't need the user icon to know you're white and male.

I'm not one of these people who thinks everybody's gay.

When you're coming out, you have to deal with the whole world saying 'Oh! You're an abominable snowman'.

I would hate for people to generalize about every Haitian from something that one Haitian did, or a group of Haitians did.

Prejudices of all kinds have their strongest holds in the minds of the vulgar and the ignorant.

I think the beard helps offset - it's the only hairstyle I can really pull off. But I'm often clean-shaven. I think, you know, for me, it's not that signifier. What's interesting to me though is although the beard isn't a signifier of that to me, other people very often think that it is. And so people in America might react differently. The, you know, border agents might react differently. The guys at airport security might react differently.

An individual's treatment and alternatives in life may depend as much on the reputation of the group to which that person belongs as on their own merit.

It bothers me when I hear these reporters and jocks get on TV and say: 'Oh, no guy can come out in a team sport. These guys would go crazy.' First of all, quit telling me what I think. I'd rather have a gay guy who can play than a straight guy who can't play.

A lot of people think that telling people you're gay is something someone might say just to get attention.

Perception, after all, is not simply a matter of what you believe about yourself, it all encompasses what others think about you, and what has been thought of you historically. I say we can pay attention to those other dimensions of our identity - class, gender, sexual orientation, geographical region - while at the same time understanding how our historically produced racial identity continues to serve, or undercut us.

Even in my adult years, when I heard a white person speaking in a Southern accent I was initially suspicious.

We are constantly being surprised that people did things well before we were born. We are constantly remarking on the fact that things are done well by people other than ourselves. "The Japanese are a remarkable little people," we say, as if we were doing them a favor. "He is an Arab, but you ought to hear him play the zither." Why "but"?

You are an American, so you're hurt that other American citizens have been hurt, but you end up having to shoulder the shame for something that you don't even believe. There's a lot of years where Muslims have dealt with having to make themselves very small and not disrupt the flow and not - make sure that you're not noticed because, you know, deep down inside people are not really excited that you're around .

People approach people of color with preconceived ideas. I don't think this is just restricted to white people, but I think that lots of black and white artists, when race is a subject matter, they put race or the ideology around race first. They don't see the person and the complications of the human being.

Maybe it is only I, but conditions are such these days, that if you use studiously correct grammar, people suspect you of homosexual tendencies.

The essence of American racism is disrespect.