John Gregory Dunne > Quotes

“Writing is a manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.”
― John Gregory Dunne

“New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities - in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East”
― John Gregory Dunne

“Hollywood is a technological crapshoot. Table stakes open at a million dollars. It was true in 1968, it is true now.”
― John Gregory Dunne

“I had been exposed to the motion picture industry at oblique angles ever since I arrived in Los Angeles in 1964, and some of its working arrangements seemed to me far more magical than that glamour for which the Industry was noted: there was the way in which failure escalated the possibilities of success, the way in which price bore no relation to demand. There was the way in which millions of dollars were gambled on ephemeral, unpredictable and, uncomfortably often, invalid ideas of marketability. There was the way that many, perhaps most, people in the Industry remained unconscious of their own myths and superstitions. There was the Eldorado mood of life in the capital, the way in which social and economic fortunes could shoot up or plummet down, as in a mining boom town, on no more than rumors, the hint of a rich vein, the gossip that the lode was played out.”
― John Gregory Dunne, The Studio

“we have become a nation of ten-minute celebrities. People, issues and causes hit the charts like rock groups, and with approximately as much staying power.”
― John Gregory Dunne, Quintana & Friends

“A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material. Resentment sharpens his eye, hostility hones his killer instinct.”
― John Gregory Dunne

“I was not deeply stirred by the Troubles, I had no allegiance”
― John Gregory Dunne, Harp