Gay Talese

“Better that you should take the chance of trying something that is close to your heart, you think is what you want to write, and if they do not publish it, put it in your drawer. But maybe another day will come and you will find a place to put that.”

“People go to restaurants for so many different reasons. To court a girl, to make some deal. Maybe to talk to some lawyer about how to get an alimony settlement better than they got last week.”

“I could come up with 50 stories that I am thinking about.”

“Restaurants are a wonderful escape for me. And are for a lot of people.”

“I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.”

“Thirteen years I took on this last book.”

“For example, many colleges in their writing programs teach some of my work.”

“News, if unreported, has no impact. It might as well have not happened at all.”

“I write and rewrite and rewrite and write and like to turn in what I think is finished work.”

“The reporter wrote with the hope that he would get a by-line in the Times, a testimony to his being alive on that day and all the tomorrows of microfilm.”

“Even after they had stopped modeling for Playboy and had settled down with other men to raise families of their own, Hugh Hefner still considered them his women, and in the bound volumes of his magazine he would always possess them.”

“With all of the qualities of the scene-setting, the dialogue, the place and time and the time and place in which your characters move. And I want to move with the characters, move with them and describe the world in which they are living.”

“Yes there is a little group of soccer aficionados, but I am not one of them.”

“The real problem is what to do with the problem-solvers after the problems are solved.”