John Gregory Dunne Quotes
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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.
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I hate to go on TV. I will start stammering.
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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.
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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.
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Class was always the domestic issue during the Vietnam War, not communism.
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Reviews don't bother me.
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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.
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Gavin Lambert was the first person in the movie business my wife and I met when we moved to Los Angeles in 1964.
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I resist and resent the idea of California as a metaphor. It's something thrust upon us, usually by people in the East.
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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.
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A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material.
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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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There are no new facts about the Kennedys, only new attitudes, a literature that, like the automobile industry, puts new bodies on old chassis.
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Conspiracy is a small but durable seller, retooled every year or so.
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I'm a great believer in the novelist being 'on the scene,' reporting, traveling, meeting all sorts of people.
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Retirement is purgatory for the former sports star. The world outside organized sports is unforgiving.
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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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There are no legends about the Duponts; the legends are about Howard Hughes.
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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.
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I've always thought a novelist only has one character, and that is himself or herself. In my case, me.
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'Time' was a glorious place to work in the years that I was there, from 1959 to 1964.
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Writing well about sports is as difficult as writing well about sex.
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Only World War II, which mobilized 10 million draftees, could by any stretch of the imagination be called a people's war.