61 Quotes by John Gregory Dunne

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.

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

What is astonishing about the social history of the Vietnam war is not how many people avoided it, but how many could not and did not.

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.

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

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.

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.

Being exposed to the enlisted Army was an eye-opener. I thought everyone was like me, but the enlisted Army is a constituency of the dispossessed.