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.
— John Gregory Dunne
Membership in the closed society of the motion-picture industry is almost never revoked for moral failings.
I hate to go on TV. I will start stammering.
Writing well about sports is as difficult as writing well about sex.
The volunteer military has always been most enthusiastically, even devoutly, embraced by those who would not themselves dream of volunteering - or of encouraging their children to do so.
No professional athlete likes to admit that he has played too long. There is too much money involved, rarely enough saved, and there is the eternal hope that age has not withered skills.
'Time' was a glorious place to work in the years that I was there, from 1959 to 1964.
Evading military service has a long history in American life.
In the spring of 1988, my wife, Joan Didion, and I were approached about writing a screenplay based on a book by Alanna Nash called 'Golden Girl,' a biography of the late network correspondent and anchorwoman Jessica Savitch.
There are no new facts about the Kennedys, only new attitudes, a literature that, like the automobile industry, puts new bodies on old chassis.
All life is inherently dangerous. But beyond that, Los Angeles is just a wonderful place to be.
You do nonfiction, you get to meet people you would not normally meet.
I've always thought a novelist only has one character, and that is himself or herself. In my case, me.
Being a professional screenwriter is perhaps the hardest occupation. Because nothing is ever yours and, by the nature of the medium, you are never ultimately responsible for your work. It can be interesting - if you have another outlet.
I love cops; I'm fascinated by the criminal justice system.
Gavin Lambert was the first person in the movie business my wife and I met when we moved to Los Angeles in 1964.
In what purports to be an egalitarian society, the existence of class is the secret about which no one speaks.
Reviews don't bother me.
The self-image of many contemporary sportswriters seems to depend on maintaining that were it not for sports, athletes would be pumping gas, if they were not sticking up the gas station.
For thirty-five years, David Halberstam, an unsilent member of the Silent Generation, has contemplated America and its place in the world, casting his eye on big subjects - Vietnam, global economics, race, mass media, and the 1950s.
Unlike Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, Jackie Robinson never tried to convert himself into an acceptable black man.
Were it not for Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey would be remembered, if at all, as a Bible-thumping midwestern Methodist windbag who neither played baseball on Sundays when he was a mediocre catcher for the St. Louis Browns and the New York Highlanders, nor attended games on the Sabbath as a baseball executive.
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.
Class was always the domestic issue during the Vietnam War, not communism.
There are no legends about the Duponts; the legends are about Howard Hughes.
Conspiracy is a small but durable seller, retooled every year or so.
Most anyplace one lives is essentially dangerous. There are floods in the Midwest, and tornadoes. There are hurricanes along the Gulf. In New York, you get mugged.
I'm not a bad mimic, and I can pick up speech cadences that I would not pick up if I didn't hit the road.
I got 'The Red White and Blue' out of journalism. It puts you in touch with the world.
What the world does not need is another script or television writer.
Being exposed to the enlisted Army was an eye-opener. I thought everyone was like me, but the enlisted Army is a constituency of the dispossessed.
A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material.
Class has always been Tom Wolfe's subject, and I suspect the reason for much of the disfavor in which he is held.
Writing is manual labor of the mind - like laying pipe.
In sports, the confluence of the 1989 Oakland vs. San Francisco World Series and the Loma Prieta earthquake notwithstanding, the earth rarely moves.
For interns at 'The Weekly Standard' or 'National Review,' where the martial instinct finds its most insistent voice, what Robert Kagan calls the military 'career path' is not widely seen as a plausible future. Pulling a trigger is what Jose, Tyrone, and Bubba do, not early admission students at the better private universities.
Retirement is purgatory for the former sports star. The world outside organized sports is unforgiving.
There was no pretense to objectivity; 'Time' had a partisan Republican point of view, and if it was one not shared by many of its gentrified Ivy Leaguers, few felt the compulsion to quit.
Only World War II, which mobilized 10 million draftees, could by any stretch of the imagination be called a people's war.
An Episcopalian military institution when it was founded near the turn of the century, Harvard for years had an implicit quota system that effectively limited the number of Jewish admissions.
The myth of the Kennedys - and the hold - was always the hold of the renegade rich, out there on the frontier beyond accountability.
I liked Los Angeles for odd reasons. For one, there was no sense of community. You were really left to your own resources, spending this inordinate amount of time alone in a balloon of an automobile. I liked that a lot.
I resist and resent the idea of California as a metaphor. It's something thrust upon us, usually by people in the East.
I'm a great believer in the novelist being 'on the scene,' reporting, traveling, meeting all sorts of people.
Life is much more available in New York - there are a dozen movie theaters within walking distance. Living in California is easier, but you get sedentary.
I am willing to believe, but I do not have the gift of faith. I'm skeptical.
I call myself a harp because I like the sound of the word - it is short, sharp, and abusive.
