Top 30 John Gregory Dunne Quotes

Writing well about sports is as difficult as writing well about sex.

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.

‘Time’ was a glorious place to work in the years that I was there, from 1959 to 1964.

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.

You do nonfiction, you get to meet people you would not normally meet.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Class was always the domestic issue during the Vietnam War, not communism.

I got ‘The Red White and Blue’ out of journalism. It puts you in touch with the world.

Writing is manual labor of the mind – like laying pipe.

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.

Reviews don’t bother me.

Class has always been Tom Wolfe’s subject, and I suspect the reason for much of the disfavor in which he is held.

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.

I’m a great believer in the novelist being ‘on the scene,’ reporting, traveling, meeting all sorts of people.

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.

There are no legends about the Duponts; the legends are about Howard Hughes.

What the world does not need is another script or television writer.

I call myself a harp because I like the sound of the word – it is short, sharp, and abusive.

A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material.

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.

Membership in the closed society of the motion-picture industry is almost never revoked for moral failings.

In what purports to be an egalitarian society, the existence of class is the secret about which no one speaks.

I am willing to believe, but I do not have the gift of faith. I’m skeptical.

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.

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.