61 Quotes by John Gregory Dunne

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.