John Gregory Dunne Quotes

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.

In sports, the confluence of the 1989 Oakland vs. San Francisco World Series and the Loma Prieta earthquake notwithstanding, the earth rarely moves.

I love cops; I’m fascinated by the criminal justice system.

You do nonfiction, you get to meet people you would not normally meet.

Violence is the way stupid people try to level the playing field.

A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material.

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.

Because one has written other books does not mean the next becomes any easier.

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.

Novels do take charge of the writer, and the writer is basically a kind of sheepdog just trying to keep things on track.

What the world does not need is another script or television writer.

There are two types of people … the scrutinizers and the scrutinized

The myth of the Kennedys – and the hold – was always the hold of the renegade rich, out there on the frontier beyond accountability.

I’ve always thought a novelist only has one character and that is himself or herself.

Only World War II, which mobilized 10 million draftees, could by any stretch of the imagination be called a people’s war.

Being exposed to the enlisted Army was an eye-opener. I thought everyone was like me, but the enlisted Army is a constituency of the dispossessed.

I’ve always thought a novelist only has one character, and that is himself or herself. In my case, me.

Unlike Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, Jackie Robinson never tried to convert himself into an acceptable black man.

The point of a notebook is to jumpstart the mind.

All life is inherently dangerous. But beyond that, Los Angeles is just a wonderful place to be.

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.

The narrative was too constricted; it was like a fetus strangling on its own umbilical cord.

The professional guts a book through – in full knowledge that what he is doing is not very good. Not to work is to exhibit a failure of nerve.

The world is divided up into two kinds of people – those who look at their body waste in the toilet bowl, and those who don’t.

The eleventh commandment of a motion picture negotiation: Thou shalt not take less than thy last deal.

I started all over again on page 1, circling the 262 pages like a vulture looking for live flesh to scavenge.

Class has always been Tom Wolfe’s subject, and I suspect the reason for much of the disfavor in which he is held.

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.

Retirement is purgatory for the former sports star. The world outside organized sports is unforgiving.

Evading military service has a long history in American life.

I’m a great believer in the novelist being ‘on the scene,’ reporting, traveling, meeting all sorts of people.

Writing is manual labor of the mind – like laying pipe.

Reviews don’t bother me.