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

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

- John Gregory Dunne

The point of a notebook is to jumpstart the mind.

- John Gregory Dunne

There are two types of people ... the scrutinizers and the scrutinized

- John Gregory Dunne

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 citi…

- 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

Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

- John Gregory Dunne

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

- John Gregory Dunne

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