Explore Quotes by Gay Talese

With all of the qualities of the scene-setting, the dialogue, the place and time and the time and place in which your characters move. And I want to move with the characters, move with them and describe the world in which they are living.

The real problem is what to do with the problem-solvers after the problems are solved.

Better that you should take the chance of trying something that is close to your heart, you think is what you want to write, and if they do not publish it, put it in your drawer. But maybe another day will come and you will find a place to put that.

People go to restaurants for so many different reasons. To court a girl, to make some deal. Maybe to talk to some lawyer about how to get an alimony settlement better than they got last week.

Thirteen years I took on this last book.

Even after they had stopped modeling for Playboy and had settled down with other men to raise families of their own, Hugh Hefner still considered them his women, and in the bound volumes of his magazine he would always possess them.

Wall Street bankers supposedly back the Yankees; Smith College girls approve of them. God, Brooks Brothers, and United States Steel are believed to be solidly in the Yankees' corner... The efficiently triumphant Yankee maching is a great institution, but, as they say, who can fall in love with U.S. Steel?

Listen, then make up your own mind.

Journalism is a voyeuristic vocation that attracts to its employment many people who are often naturally shy and insatiably curious, and each day they are assigned to view the world with a critical eye and a detached sense of intimacy.

Putting on a beautifully designed suit elevates my spirit, extols my sense of self, and helps define me as a man to whom details matter.

It's true what they say - all the good men are married. But it's marriage that makes them good.

I write and rewrite and rewrite and write and like to turn in what I think is finished work.

News, if unreported, has no impact. It might as well have not happened at all

The reporter wrote with the hope that he would get a by-line in the Times, a testimony to his being alive on that day and all the tomorrows of microfilm

For example, many colleges in their writing programs teach some of my work.

People dress up for funerals. Why not dress up to celebrate that you’re alive?

Restaurants are a wonderful escape for me. And are for a lot of people.

I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.

I could come up with 50 stories that I am thinking about.

Sports is about people who lose and lose and lose. They lose games; then they lose their jobs. It can be very intriguing.

Yes there is a little group of soccer aficionados, but I am not one of them.