Quotes from Gay Talese

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

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.

I've always had standards about writing well. There is art in this business. There is potentially great art.

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

Sports is about people who lose and lose and lose. They lose games; then they lose their jobs. It can be very intriguing.

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take the chance of trying something that is close to your heart, you think is what you want to write, and if they do not publish it, put it in your drawer.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

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.

Thirteen years I took on this last book.

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.

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

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

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

They were unabashed voyeurs looking at him; and Talese looked back.

For everyone in this occupation, the skyline of New York is a family tree.

Si nuestra sociedad tuviera la oportunidad de ser voyeur por un día, abordaría la vida de manera muy distinta a como lo hace ahora.

MOST BIG BESTSELLERS of the past deserve to be relegated to the damp bookshelves of guest bedrooms in country houses, but Thy Neighbor's Wife is not one of them. The writing of it took Talese nine years, and those years show, in the richness of the stories, in the density of detail, in the sweeping, panoramic view he gives us of America in flux.

Indians hate to drive with license plates on their cars and would like to remove them, presumably so they'll get fewer speeding tickets (although many Indians ignore all tickets on the grounds that they are not valid documents, having never been agreed to by treaty).

Isn't it exhausting, one could ask, this emotionally wrought involvement with so many sources, so many intimacies? For most of us it would be. But it is this novelist's heart, this writer's strange and insatiable passion for observation, for describing in all of its spectacular complexity the bewildering and plentiful world, that raises this brilliant and unruly book from its time, and makes it a classic of cultural journalism.

él estaba cumpliendo con su deber, estaba haciendo no lo que quería sino lo que tenía que hacer

I am not used to being called a son-of-a-bitch," Sulzberger remarked to an editor after one unpleasant experience, "but I suppose I shall learn to like it.

Perhaps part of the problem, he thought, was that the world was changing faster than people were able to change themselves, and the leaders in government and the press were being guided by theories and assumptions that had once worked but were now outmoded.

Newspaper reporters would now have to dig more deeply into more areas and to inform the public more thoroughly; they could no longer merely report all the facts, but they would often have to interpret the meaning behind these facts. The trick was to do this without editorializing.

im fucking bored

Unlike the millions who casually masturbate in solitude while looking at girlie pictures in Playboy and similar magazines, the massage man preferred an accomplice, an attendant lady of respectable appearance who would help him reduce the guilt and loneliness of this most lonely act of love.