JOHN DUNNE

The Voting Rights Act is a voter protection act, not a candidate or incumbent protection act.

We do not believe that minorities can only be represented by minorities..

What is a reporter except a kind of house detective, scavenging through the bureau drawers of men's lives, searching for the minor vice, the half-forgotten lapse that is stored away like a dirty pair of drawers.

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

What the world does not need is another script or television writer.

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.

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.

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.

Evading military service has a long history in American life.

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

A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material.

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.

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

Reviews don't bother me.

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.

Unlike Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, Jackie Robinson never tried to convert himself into an acceptable black man.

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

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.

I am willing to believe, but I do not have the gift of faith. I'm skeptical.

I'm a great believer in the novelist being 'on the scene,' reporting, traveling, meeting all sorts of people.

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.

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.

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

I call myself a harp because I like the sound of the word - it is short, sharp, and abusive.