John Grisham Quotes

If you're gonna start a story, you start from the beginning, right?

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn't a rule about this. But there's a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

You spend so much time as a writer telling straight and linear stories.

It is very linear storytelling, and I think that's not so much the fashion. I was watching a new drama the other night which was extremely non-linear, where you flash back and flash forward in ways that certainly keeps you on your toes as the audience. There's not much of that courage with the storytelling in our Maigret film.

I don't make unconventional stories; I don't make non-linear stories. I like linear storytelling a lot.

I don't like plots. I don't know what a plot means. I can't stand the idea of anything that starts in the beginning - you know, 'beginning, middle and end.'

When I was growing up, Dr. Seuss was really my favorite. There was something about the lyrical nature and the simplicity of his work that really hit me.

Books are not like albums, where you can simply download and enjoy your favorite chapter and ignore the rest.

My books are written with a strong chronological spine.

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.

With 'All Is Song,' I tried to construct a very traditional narrative that pulls no tricks.

The perfect story is one you can retell in three minutes, and every single sentence is interesting.

I try to tell my story as simply as possible, with the camera at eye level.

The films that I love are very straightforward stories, like really old-fashioned stuff.

I think the bravest thing to write about is nothing, just to write a book in which nothing happens.

The best movies are simple.

I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.

Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.

Comics as art. I do comics as comics, and my opportunity to tell stories. Simple. Basic. Let the characters have the excitement, not the package. That's where I come from.

Look at Austen. In her novels, you get a dance, followed by an encounter, followed by a letter, then a period of solitude. No flashbacks and no backstory. Let's have no more back story!

It's not like some movies where you're following a bunch of different stories you can cut around. There was nowhere to cut to. It's these guys. We're not cutting back to anybody else.

I'm one of those people who think that stories should have a beginning, a middle and an end, and then they're over, and then you tell the next story.

You can't tell a story linearly if you want people to understand.

All the characters and plots were predetermined. Games make bad plots.

Symbolism is alright in 'fiction,' but I tell true life stories simply about what happened to people I knew.