Gay Talese's Quotes

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take the chance of trying something that is close to your heart, you think is what you want to write, and if they do not publish it, put it in your drawer.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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Thirteen years I took on this last book.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Do not share the knowledge with which you have been blessed with everyone in general, as you do with some people in particular; and know that there are some men in whom Allah, may He he glorified, has placed hidden secrets, which they are forbidden to reveal.

Do for this life as if you live forever, do for the afterlife as if you die tomorrow.

Do not be too hard, lest you be broken; do not be too soft, lest you be squeezed.

He who busies himself with things other than improvement of his own self becomes perplexed in darkness and entangled in ruin. His evil spirits immerse him deep in vices and make his bad actions seem handsome.

No one has ever suffered from his people as I have.

To make one good action succeed another, is the perfection of goodness.

A poor man is like a foreigner in his own country.

A man's measure is his will.

People's hearts are like wild animals. They attach their selves to those that love and train them.

If poverty were a man, I would have slain him.

I was not created to be occupied by eating delicious foods like tied up cattle.

Abstinence from sins is better than seeking help afterwards.