John Gregory Dunne

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.

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.

Conspiracy is a small but durable seller, retooled every year or so.

There are no new facts about the Kennedys, only new attitudes, a literature that, like the automobile industry, puts new bodies on old chassis.

The myth of the Kennedys - and the hold - was always the hold of the renegade rich, out there on the frontier beyond accountability.

There are no legends about the Duponts; the legends are about Howard Hughes.

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.

Evading military service has a long history in American life.

Only World War II, which mobilized 10 million draftees, could by any stretch of the imagination be called a people's war.

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.

'Time' was a glorious place to work in the years that I was there, from 1959 to 1964.

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.

All life is inherently dangerous. But beyond that, Los Angeles is just a wonderful place to be.

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.

Retirement is purgatory for the former sports star. The world outside organized sports is unforgiving.

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.

Writing well about sports is as difficult as writing well about sex.

In sports, the confluence of the 1989 Oakland vs. San Francisco World Series and the Loma Prieta earthquake notwithstanding, the earth rarely moves.

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.

I hate to go on TV. I will start stammering.

Reviews don't bother me.

Membership in the closed society of the motion-picture industry is almost never revoked for moral failings.

Class has always been Tom Wolfe's subject, and I suspect the reason for much of the disfavor in which he is held.

In what purports to be an egalitarian society, the existence of class is the secret about which no one speaks.

Gavin Lambert was the first person in the movie business my wife and I met when we moved to Los Angeles in 1964.