Quotes from George Plimpton

The smaller the ball used in the sport, the better the book.

Well, I have to write. A lot of people forget that. They think I'm sort of crazy baffoon who can't make up his mind what to do in life

The New York Times published the guest list on the front page. The masks were a brilliant concept.

It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.

As happens with people who love a thing too much, it destroys them. Oscar Wilde said, 'You destroy the thing that you love.' It's the other way around. What you love destroys you.

Give me good books, good conversations, and my Trek Y-Foil, and I shall want for nothing else.

I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun.

At the base of it was the urge, if you wanted to play football, to knock someone down, that was what the sport was all about, the will to win closely linked with contact.

I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun.

The pleasure of sport was so often the chance to indulge the cessation of time itself--the pitcher dawdling on the mound, the skier poised at the top of a mountain trail, the basketball player with the rough skin of the ball against his palm preparing for a foul shot, the tennis player at set point over his opponent--all of them savoring a moment before committing themselves to action.

He still has the same way of calling to me, as if I'm still new to him, as if he has yet to get over me.

Art has something to do with the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

You do not cut a check in the state of Kansas to John Doe, executioner. The executioner is paid in cash so there's no trail to him

A male star named "T.T. Boy"....is a legend in the business [actor in commercial porn films]. T.T. Boy does not look at all glamorous - he's a small, tough-guy, assistant mobster type; sometimes he chews gum during his lovemaking scenes. He pounds his partners...Once memorably described as 'nothing more than a life-support system for his penis,' he got the kind of admiring, solid applause reserved for a large artillery piece going by in a parade.

America is very, very cruel to its artists. It doesn't give them a chance for growth. It doesn't give them elbow room for change. There's no room at all for failure." - Carol Marcus Matthau

Besides, good swearing is used as a form of punctuation, not necessarily a response to pain or insult, and is utilized by experts to lend a sentence a certain zest, like a sprinkling of paprika.

He was interviewed in the early '60s by a young novelist, Pati Hill.

I remember being awed by it - the uniqueness and nicety of style - and I suspect I was a bit jealous because we were more or less of the same generation.