John Gregory Dunne famous quotes

03-28-2025

Iâ€™ve always thought a novelist only has one character and that is himself or herself.
-- John Gregory Dunne

#Character #Novelists
Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.
-- John Gregory Dunne

#Jobs #Writing #Mind
Violence is the way stupid people try to level the playing field.
-- John Gregory Dunne

#Stupid #People #Trying
The eleventh commandment of a motion picture negotiation: Thou shalt not take less than thy last deal.
-- John Gregory Dunne

#Lasts #Strategy #Negotiation
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

#Two #People #Looks
There are two types of people ... the scrutinizers and the scrutinized
-- John Gregory Dunne

#Two #People #Type
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

#New York #Congratulations #Self
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

#Writing #Track #Trying
The narrative was too constricted; it was like a fetus strangling on its own umbilical cord.
-- John Gregory Dunne

#Umbilical Cord #Fetus #Literature
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

#Work #Book #Nerves

You may also like:

Annie Dillard
Author
Barbra Streisand
Singer-songwriter
Bret Easton Ellis
Novelist
Calvin Trillin
Journalist
Cesar Chavez
Civil rights activist
Dominick Dunne
Writer
Gay Talese
Author
Griffin Dunne
Actor
James Ellroy
Crime writer
Jessica Savitch
Television personality
Joan Didion
Author
Joyce Carol Oates
Author
Norman Mailer
Novelist
Rupert Holmes
Composer
Sara Davidson
Journalist
Susan Sontag
Writer
Tom Wolfe
Author
William Faulkner
Writer
Frank Pierson
Screenwriter
Jay Presson Allen
Screenwriter