Words matter. These are the best John Gregory Dunne Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Evading military service has a long history in American life.
No professional athlete likes to admit that he has played too long. There is too much money involved, rarely enough saved, and there is the eternal hope that age has not withered skills.
You do nonfiction, you get to meet people you would not normally meet.
I love cops; I’m fascinated by the criminal justice system.
Being a professional screenwriter is perhaps the hardest occupation. Because nothing is ever yours and, by the nature of the medium, you are never ultimately responsible for your work. It can be interesting – if you have another outlet.
In the spring of 1988, my wife, Joan Didion, and I were approached about writing a screenplay based on a book by Alanna Nash called ‘Golden Girl,’ a biography of the late network correspondent and anchorwoman Jessica Savitch.
The myth of the Kennedys – and the hold – was always the hold of the renegade rich, out there on the frontier beyond accountability.
Retirement is purgatory for the former sports star. The world outside organized sports is unforgiving.
The volunteer military has always been most enthusiastically, even devoutly, embraced by those who would not themselves dream of volunteering – or of encouraging their children to do so.
Reviews don’t bother me.
Life is much more available in New York – there are a dozen movie theaters within walking distance. Living in California is easier, but you get sedentary.
Conspiracy is a small but durable seller, retooled every year or so.
An Episcopalian military institution when it was founded near the turn of the century, Harvard for years had an implicit quota system that effectively limited the number of Jewish admissions.
I got ‘The Red White and Blue’ out of journalism. It puts you in touch with the world.
There are no legends about the Duponts; the legends are about Howard Hughes.
Class has always been Tom Wolfe’s subject, and I suspect the reason for much of the disfavor in which he is held.
Were it not for Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey would be remembered, if at all, as a Bible-thumping midwestern Methodist windbag who neither played baseball on Sundays when he was a mediocre catcher for the St. Louis Browns and the New York Highlanders, nor attended games on the Sabbath as a baseball executive.
There are no new facts about the Kennedys, only new attitudes, a literature that, like the automobile industry, puts new bodies on old chassis.
I resist and resent the idea of California as a metaphor. It’s something thrust upon us, usually by people in the East.
I’ve always thought a novelist only has one character, and that is himself or herself. In my case, me.
The self-image of many contemporary sportswriters seems to depend on maintaining that were it not for sports, athletes would be pumping gas, if they were not sticking up the gas station.
Unlike Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, Jackie Robinson never tried to convert himself into an acceptable black man.
Writing is manual labor of the mind – like laying pipe.
There was no pretense to objectivity; ‘Time’ had a partisan Republican point of view, and if it was one not shared by many of its gentrified Ivy Leaguers, few felt the compulsion to quit.
For thirty-five years, David Halberstam, an unsilent member of the Silent Generation, has contemplated America and its place in the world, casting his eye on big subjects – Vietnam, global economics, race, mass media, and the 1950s.
What the world does not need is another script or television writer.
Writing well about sports is as difficult as writing well about sex.
I liked Los Angeles for odd reasons. For one, there was no sense of community. You were really left to your own resources, spending this inordinate amount of time alone in a balloon of an automobile. I liked that a lot.
I call myself a harp because I like the sound of the word – it is short, sharp, and abusive.
I am willing to believe, but I do not have the gift of faith. I’m skeptical.
