John Grisham Quotes

Writers are not celebrities, so you don't expect to walk down the street and hear, 'Oh my God, there's Sylvia Day.' You prefer to be anonymous.

I don't think about being famous, really. Being an author, I don't generally get stopped as I walk down the street. It's not like being a movie star.

If I can hit No. 1 on the 'New York Times' best-seller list, I'm thinking of having the entire list tattooed on my body somewhere. It would be fabulous.

Every famous writer was once an unknown writer. If publishers never published new writers, they wouldn't be publishing anyone at all after a while.

I think it's great when writers get recognition; it doesn't happen very often. I just don't want that writer to be me. Let it be Aaron Sorkin or, you know, somebody good.

Obviously, my name is known now, but I don't think people generally tend to recognize authors very much. People like J. K. Rowling maybe, Gillian Flynn might be recognized, but I reckon she could walk by me on the street, and I wouldn't know who she was.

When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship.

What would have become of me if no one had wanted to read my books? And don't forget all those who have written of me.

I want to be known as 'The Big Shakespeare.' It was Shakespeare that said, 'Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them.'

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

I don't chase publishers. Publishers chase me.

I'm like a unicorn; I'm a midlist writer who hasn't done anything else but write. But because I wasn't amazingly famous, I didn't become Stephanie Meyer, or even a huge literary name like a Jonathan Franzen or a Joshua Ferris.

What's the point in being an unpopular writer? It just doesn't make a lot of sense. For me it doesn't, anyway.

Most people I know don't even realize I'm an award-winning author, but I have gotten many opportunities to travel to places I'd never have visited otherwise.

I just wrote the book and was amazed and astounded that it became a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. It still hasn't sunk in.

Winning the Whitbread was a very major thing for me. I'd always been well reviewed, but this made me widely read.

When you write a book, you're an expert, and people look at you in a different way.

I'm already more famous than I want to be. And yet at the same time, fame feeds your potential as a creative person. You're in a vacuum if you don't have a certain amount of fame.

Becoming famous is a strange thing in your own right.

I'm essentially a humorist and, I think, a pretty good one. I've known all along that 'My Friend Dahmer' is the one book I'll be most known for, and in a way, that's a drag, as it's nothing like the rest of the work I've done or will do moving forward. But the way I figure, it's better to have a best-known work than not to have one at all.

When I go outside of L.A., no matter where it is, really anywhere I go, people will be stopping me or taking pictures or whatever it is. And it's great. It's amazing. I'm just lucky.

Famous is celebrityism, and I don't want that... I know that I'm not that. Everybody knows who you are. I can't imagine living that life, but I don't think I consider myself famous.

I didn't set out to be famous; if I'd wanted that, I would have gone on 'Big Brother.'

It's like a series of waves hitting you. First, getting excerpted in the 'New Yorker' last summer, then getting published, then the best-seller list, the award, the movie deal, now this, a Pulitzer.

Luckily, I don't think that I'm too famous. I can still live my life pretty comfortably. Fame has never really ever appealed to me. I think it's easy to see that it's not a great thing to have.