John Gregory Dunne quotes:
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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.
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Novels do take charge of the writer, and the writer is basically a kind of sheepdog just trying to keep things on track.
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The narrative was too constricted; it was like a fetus strangling on its own umbilical cord.
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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.
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Violence is the way stupid people try to level the playing field.
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The eleventh commandment of a motion picture negotiation: Thou shalt not take less than thy last deal.
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The point of a notebook is to jumpstart the mind.
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I started all over again on page 1, circling the 262 pages like a vulture looking for live flesh to scavenge.
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I've always thought a novelist only has one character and that is himself or herself.
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Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.
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There are two types of people ... the scrutinizers and the scrutinized
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Because one has written other books does not mean the next becomes any easier.
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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.