John Grisham Quotes

I don't like movies that are trying to preach and trying to tell you how to feel.

I don't like things I work on to have political didacticism - there are questions, but not messages.

I don't like message movies either.

I think cinema should provoke thoughts, sure, but using it as I soapbox I think is the wrong place. I never want to be part of something like that, where there's an agenda there that's not about telling a story, where its someone getting on a soapbox and preaching their own beliefs onto somebody.

If I was asked to do a film that was just trying to sell a political point of view or religious point of view, I wouldn't do that because that's a bad script.

The last thing I ever want to do is be preachy.

I try my best not to be preachy.

Instead of educating students, these professors are trying to indoctrinate them.

For the most part, I don't like people who soapbox.

What I do not want to write is didactic political tracts.

I don't want to interview people for the purpose of developing a world view and pushing that on people.

I don't think being a writer who is religious means you have to write about nothing but religion. When I do write about religion, it's to inform the story, not to push a certain agenda.

We are all missionaries (propagandists of our views). Each of us disapproves of the other missionaries.

To prejudge other men's notions before we have looked into them is not to show the darkness but to put out our own eyes.

Convictions are much more an enemy of the truth than lies.

Prejudice locks the mind. Nothing can enter. Nothing true can escape.

History is a distillation of rumor.

We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. When we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time. The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.]

Facts matter, especially when they conflict with dogma and preconceived notions. Pretending otherwise has consequences.

One of the most disconcerting phenomena of these times is the disparity between the enormous amount of idealist propaganda that goes on from pulpit, platform and press, and the inconsiderable effect that it seems to produce in the actual conduct of men and of nations.

Is journalism a profession that serves the public by maintaining high standards, or is it a social construct that should be redesigned to directly serve certain social goods? Some argue that all journalism involves bias, either hidden or revealed. But it is one thing to say that objectivity and fairness are ultimately unreachable. It is another to cease grasping for them. That would be a world of purely private truths, in which the boldest liars and demagogues would thrive.

Verbs allow you to communicate a story in a much more converged or involuntary way for a reader. The verbs allow you to come in under the radar, below people's defenses.

For the anti-Semite, the problems of the world can invariably be ascribed to the Jews; for the Communist, to the capitalists.

The thing I hate the most in any kind of writing is self-righteousness. Where you pretend you don't have the same kinds of flaws your subject has.

There comes a time in every writer's life when it becomes necessary to recognize what people really care about.