A biography for John Gregory Dunnehasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Writing is a manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.”
“Unlike Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, Jackie Robinson never tried to convert himself into an acceptable black man.”
“There are no legends about the Duponts; the legends are about Howard Hughes.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Writing is manual labor of the mind - like laying pipe.”
“I've always thought a novelist only has one character, and that is himself or herself. In my case, me.”
“In sports, the confluence of the 1989 Oakland vs. San Francisco World Series and the Loma Prieta earthquake notwithstanding, the earth rarely moves.”
“I'm a great believer in the novelist being 'on the scene,' reporting, traveling, meeting all sorts of people.”
“I hate to go on TV. I will start stammering.”
“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.”
“Conspiracy is a small but durable seller, retooled every year or so.”
“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.”
“Class has always been Tom Wolfe's subject, and I suspect the reason for much of the disfavor in which he is held.”
“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.”
“Evading military service has a long history in American life.”