John Gregory Dunne Quotes
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Unlike Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, Jackie Robinson never tried to convert himself into an acceptable black man.
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Class has always been Tom Wolfe's subject, and I suspect the reason for much of the disfavor in which he is held.
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You do nonfiction, you get to meet people you would not normally meet.
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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.
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I got 'The Red White and Blue' out of journalism. It puts you in touch with the world.
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What the world does not need is another script or television writer.
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For interns at 'The Weekly Standard' or 'National Review,' where the martial instinct finds its most insistent voice, what Robert Kagan calls the military 'career path' is not widely seen as a plausible future. Pulling a trigger is what Jose, Tyrone, and Bubba do, not early admission students at the better private universities.
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I am willing to believe, but I do not have the gift of faith. I'm skeptical.
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In what purports to be an egalitarian society, the existence of class is the secret about which no one speaks.
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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.
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I love cops; I'm fascinated by the criminal justice system.
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Writing is manual labor of the mind - like laying pipe.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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All life is inherently dangerous. But beyond that, Los Angeles is just a wonderful place to be.
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In sports, the confluence of the 1989 Oakland vs. San Francisco World Series and the Loma Prieta earthquake notwithstanding, the earth rarely moves.
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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.
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I call myself a harp because I like the sound of the word - it is short, sharp, and abusive.
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What is astonishing about the social history of the Vietnam war is not how many people avoided it, but how many could not and did not.
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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.
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I'm not a bad mimic, and I can pick up speech cadences that I would not pick up if I didn't hit the road.
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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.
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I hate to go on TV. I will start stammering.