John Gregory Dunne Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

What civilians do not understand—and to a writer anyone not a writer is a civilian—is that writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

John Gregory Dunne
I've always thought a novelist only has one character and that is himself or herself.

John Gregory Dunne
I have no grand plan of what I'm going to do. I had no idea who killed the girl in True Confessions until the day I wrote it.

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

John Gregory Dunne
I agree with William Faulkner, who once said that a writer's obituary should read, 'He wrote books, then he died.'.

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

John Gregory Dunne
I think any time a writer tells you where a book starts, he is lying, because I don't think he knows.

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. Resentment sharpens his eye, hostility hones his killer instinct.

John Gregory Dunne
I started all over again on page 1, circling the 262 pages like a vulture looking for live flesh to scavenge.

John Gregory Dunne
Because one has written other books does not mean the next becomes any easier.

John Gregory Dunne
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