59 Quotes by Gay Talese

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

It’s true what they say – all the good men are married. But it’s marriage that makes them good.

When a bridge fails, the engineer who designed it is as good as dead.

I’ve always had standards about writing well. There is art in this business. There is potentially great art.

And so there is nothing new in Thy Neighbor’s Wife. Nor is there anything old.

Gerald Foos’s explanation in his journal – he was ‘only an observer and not a reporter,’ and he ‘really didn’t exist as far as the male and female subjects were concerned’ – were explanations that didn’t surprise me because of his often-expressed notion that he was a fractured individual, a hybridized combination of the Voyeur and Gerald Foos.

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

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.

They were unabashed voyeurs looking at him; and Talese looked back.