John Gregory Dunne Quotes

#1. Violence is the way stupid people try to level the playing field.

John Gregory Dunne

#2. There are two types of people ... the scrutinizers and the scrutinized

John Gregory Dunne

#3. I started all over again on page 1, circling the 262 pages like a vulture looking for live flesh to scavenge.

John Gregory Dunne

#4. The professional guts a book through - in full knowledge that what he is doing is not very good. Not to work is to exhibit a failure of nerve.

John Gregory Dunne

#5. The point of a notebook is to jumpstart the mind.

John Gregory Dunne

#6. Writing is a manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

John Gregory Dunne

#7. Novels do take charge of the writer, and the writer is basically a kind of sheepdog just trying to keep things on track.

John Gregory Dunne

#8. The eleventh commandment of a motion picture negotiation: Thou shalt not take less than thy last deal.

John Gregory Dunne

#9. 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

#10. The narrative was too constricted; it was like a fetus strangling on its own umbilical cord.

John Gregory Dunne

#11. The world is divided up into two kinds of people - those who look at their body waste in the toilet bowl, and those who don't.

John Gregory Dunne

#12. I've always thought a novelist only has one character and that is himself or herself.

John Gregory Dunne

#13. Because one has written other books does not mean the next becomes any easier.

John Gregory Dunne