John Gregory Dunne

John Gregory Dunne (May 25, 1932 – December 30, 2003) was an American writer. He began his career as a journalist for Time magazine before expanding into writing criticism, essays, novels, and screenplays. He often collaborated with his wife, Joan Didion.

Quotes

• The insatiable appetites of instant communication have necessitated a whole new set of media ground rules, pedicated not only on the recording of fact but also on the projection of glamour and image and promise. The result of this cultural nymphomania is that we have become a nation of ten-minute celebrities. People, issues and causes hit the charts like rock groups, and with approximately as much staying power.
  • Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967) pp. 129–130

• I had been exposed to the motion picture industry at oblique angles ever since I arrived in Los Angeles in 1964, and some of its working arrangements seemed to me far more magical than that glamour for which the Industry was noted: there was the way in which failure escalated the possibilities of success, the way in which price bore no relation to demand. There was the way in which millions of dollars were gambled on ephemeral, unpredictable and, uncomfortably often, invalid ideas of marketability. There was the way that many, perhaps most, people in the Industry remained unconscious of their own myths and superstitions. There was the Eldorado mood of life in the capital, the way in which social and economic fortunes could shoot up or plummet down, as in a mining boom town, on no more than rumors, the hint of a rich vein, the gossip that the lode was played out.
  • The Studio (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969) pp. 6–7

• Hollywood is a technological crapshoot.
  • "Foreword", The Studio (New York: Limelight Editions, 1985). Quoted in David F. Prindle, Risky Business: The Political Economy of Hollywood (Westview Press, 1993) ch. 1, p. 6

• A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material. Resentment sharpens his eye, hostility hones his killer instinct.
  • Harp (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989) p. 49

• 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.
  • Reported in William Cole (ed.) New York: A Literary Companion (Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1992) p. 36

• Membership in the closed society of the motion picture industry is almost never revoked for moral failings.
  • Playland (New York: Random House, 1994) ch. 1, p. 12

• Beating up on screenwriters is a Hollywood blood sport; everyone in the business thinks he or she can write, if only time could be found. That writers find the time is evidence of their inferior position on the food chain. In the Industry, they are regarded as chronic malcontents, overpaid and undertalented, the Hollywood version of Hessians, measuring their worth in dollars, since ownership of their words belongs to those who hire and fire them.
  • Monster: Living Off the Big Screen (New York: Random House, 1997) 1. Foreman: The 1988 Writers Strike

• Stanley claims that 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.
  • Nothing Lost: A Novel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004) p. 329

Crooning: A Collection (1990)

New York: Simon & Schuster

• There are no new facts about the Kennedys, only new attitudes, a literature that, like the automobile industry, puts new bodies on old chassis. ... Conspiracy is a small but durable seller, retooled every year or so.
  • "Elephant Man", from The New York Review of Books (April 15, 1982) p. 10 [Review of Wills' Kennedy Imprisonment]. Reprinted as "On the Kennedys"

• 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.
  • "REMFs" (1986)

• Writing is a manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.
  • "Laying Pipe", from Esquire (c. 1986)

• I started all over again on page 1, circling the 262 pages like a vulture looking for live flesh to scavenge.
  • "Laying Pipe"

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

• It deserves to be mentioned here that one purpose of these huge fees is to establish respect; in the constitution of Hollywood, a million-dollar director has half a million dollars more respect than a $500,000 director. This is why the Eleventh Commandment of a motion picture negotiation is Thou shalt not take less than thy last deal. Everyone knows what everyone else makes (this information is passed around like popcorn at a movie), and the person who violates this Eleventh Commandment is seen not as a model of restraint and moderation but as a plain goddamn fool.
  • "Dealing", from Esquire (c. 1989)

• Anecdotes are factoids of questionable provenance, burnished to a high gloss, often set in gilded venues and populated with familiar names as background atmosphere, purged of ambiguity in the interest of keeping the narrative flowing smoothly.
  • "Sam" [Review of Sinclair's Spiegel: The Man Behind the Pictures]