John Gregory Dunne Quotes
-
The myth of the Kennedys - and the hold - was always the hold of the renegade rich, out there on the frontier beyond accountability.
-
Most anyplace one lives is essentially dangerous. There are floods in the Midwest, and tornadoes. There are hurricanes along the Gulf. In New York, you get mugged.
-
I call myself a harp because I like the sound of the word - it is short, sharp, and abusive.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Membership in the closed society of the motion-picture industry is almost never revoked for moral failings.
-
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.
-
Class was always the domestic issue during the Vietnam War, not communism.
-
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.
-
Reviews don't bother me.
-
I'm a great believer in the novelist being 'on the scene,' reporting, traveling, meeting all sorts of people.
-
Gavin Lambert was the first person in the movie business my wife and I met when we moved to Los Angeles in 1964.
-
A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material.
-
I resist and resent the idea of California as a metaphor. It's something thrust upon us, usually by people in the East.
-
Only World War II, which mobilized 10 million draftees, could by any stretch of the imagination be called a people's war.
-
I've always thought a novelist only has one character, and that is himself or herself. In my case, me.
-
Retirement is purgatory for the former sports star. The world outside organized sports is unforgiving.
-
Conspiracy is a small but durable seller, retooled every year or so.
-
There are no new facts about the Kennedys, only new attitudes, a literature that, like the automobile industry, puts new bodies on old chassis.
-
Anecdotes are factoids of questionable provenance, burnished to a high gloss, often set in gilded venues and populated with familiar names as background atmosphere, purged of ambiguity in the interest of keeping the narrative flowing smoothly.