George Plimpton Quotes & Sayings

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 — George Plimpton

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

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 — George Plimpton

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

I never understood people who don't have bookshelves. — George Plimpton

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. — George Plimpton

The smaller the ball used in the sport, the better the book. — George Plimpton

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

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. — George Plimpton

It's like people always say, Well, does sport teach you anything in life? It teaches you certain things, but it doesn't teach you other things. It doesn't teach, as I say, very much about marriage, very much about how to make a living, any of those things. — George Plimpton

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. — George Plimpton

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

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

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. — George Plimpton

My favorite monologue in the book is Kate Harrington's story of her relationship with Truman. — George Plimpton

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. — George Plimpton

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. — George Plimpton

Rick Bass is one of the best writers of his generation. — George Plimpton

Golf cannot be played in anger, or in any mood of emotiional excess. Half the golf balls struck by amateurs are hit if not in rage surely in bewilderment, or gloom, or in cynicism, or even hysterically - all of those emotional excesses must be contained by the professional. Which is why balance is one of the essential ingredients of golf. Professionals invariably trudge phlegmatically around the course - whatever emotions are seething within - with the grim yet placid and bored look of cowpokes, slack-bodied in their saddles, who have been tending the same herd for two months. — George Plimpton