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John Grisham
Best-Selling Author
I give commencement speeches occasionally to colleges and high schools, and I usually dwell on that, tell the students, "Get your education and work hard, but don't race toward the age of 22 or 23 when you're out of college, and you've got the credit card, and you've got the BMW, and you want everything right then at the age of 23, because you're not going to enjoy your education." I tell kids to stay in school until they're 30 years old. Their parents hate me for it, but nobody really takes you very seriously until you're 30 anyway. You need to spend a lot of time in school.
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John Grisham
Best-Selling Author
The basics of grammar and vocabulary are very important. And you tend to take it for granted, until you start trying to write. It is terribly important to read extensively. Virtually all writers I know are voracious readers still, and that is preparation. The more you read, the more you know. The more your imagination works, the more you read. And that's -- those are the tools of a good writer. You have to live. Nobody wants to hear -- the world does not want to hear -- a great novel from a 21 year-old. You've got to get a real job and get a real career, and you've got to go to work. And you've got to live and you've got to succeed and fail, and suffer, a little bit, or see suffering, heartache and heartbreak and all that before you really have anything to write.
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David Halberstam
Pulitzer Prize for Journalism
Instead of going to New York or Washington or something like that, the gilded path -- and I was credentialed -- I went and worked on the smallest daily in Mississippi. It's a year after Brown v. Board of Education. I thought if you are going to do an apprenticeship, do it in the South, that's where the story is. And I worked with great reporters on a very important story, and I learned how to cover it, how to put yourself at risk, what the ethics were. I sat there, and I absorbed. If I had been a young reporter going to New York, I would have been one of 30 guys out of an Ivy League school going to a paper where all the senior reporters didn't have time to talk to you. By being the one guy like me going to Mississippi and then to Nashville, that was a great graduate school! I was working on a paper in Nashville that had more good reporters, more tough-minded people, and I was the only guy who, every night at dinner, when we would go out to dinner, just inhaled everything, made them go through what they'd done each day. It was a great, great graduate school for me.
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