In describing John Gregory Dunne, David Halberstam recalled, "John was very Irish - or more precisely, very Irish American." His 1969 book, 'The Studio' was John's first big book.
In an interview with 'The Paris Review' in 1996, John shared, "Before I began writing fiction I thought that was nonsense. Then I learned otherwise. Let me give you an example. In 'The Red White and Blue', I started off thinking the protagonist would be the Benedictine priest, Bro Broderick. I realized rather quickly that he could not be but that I was stuck with him as a character. He never really came to life until I finished the book and went back and inserted his diary, which he had left in his will to the Widener Library at Harvard. Then for 300 pages or so I thought the leading character was the radical lawyer Leah Kaye, because whenever she appeared on the scene the book took off. Then when I got to page 500 of this 750-page manuscript I realized she couldn’t be the leading character because she had not appeared in over 200 pages. It was only then that I realized that the narrator, who was the only survivor of the 3 major protagonists, would have to be the leading character. So novels do take charge of the writer, and the writer is basically a kind of sheepdog just trying to keep things on track."
John emphasized, "I think any time a writer tells you where a book starts, he is lying, because I don’t think he knows. You don’t start off saying, 'I’m going to write this grand saga about the human condition.' It’s a form of accretion....Essentially, writing is a sort of manual labor of the mind. It is a hard job, but there comes a moment in every book, I suppose, when you know you’re going to finish and then it becomes a kind of bliss, almost a sexual bliss....There’s a technical difference (between non-fiction and fiction). I find that the sentences are more ornate and elaborate in non-fiction because you don’t have dialog to get you on your way. Non-fiction has its ruffles and flourishes, clauses and semicolons. I never use a semicolon in fiction."
