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624 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
“I have never seen much point in getting heavy with stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don't bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as the one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I... And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there's a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots.”
the sleazy...argument that 'Nixon has been punished enough' is an ignorant...cliche...But that image of him walking awkward and alone across the White House lawn at night, oblivious to everything...except that little black and silver tape recorder that he is holding up to his lips, talking softly and constantly to 'history', with the brittle intensity of a madman: when you think on that image for a while, remember that the name Nixon will seem to give off a strange odor every time it is mentioned for the next 300 years, and in every history book written from now on, 'Nixon' will be synonymous with shame, corruption and failure.
...sportswriters are a kind of rude and brainless subculture of fascist drunks...The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: (1) a blind willingness to believe anything you're told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers...and (2) a Roget's Thesaurus, in order to avoid using the same verbs and adjectives twice in the same paragraph. Even a sports editor...might notice something wrong with a lead that said: 'the precision-jackhammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls off the Washington Redskins today by stomping and hammering with one precise jackthrust after another'...And there was the genius of Grantland Rice [Nixon's favorite writer]. He carried a pocket thesaurus, so that 'the thundering hoofbeats of the four horsemen' never echoed more than once in the same paragraph, and the 'granite-grey sky' in his lead was a 'cold dark dusk' in the last lonely line of his heart-rending, nerve-ripping stories...Like all great sportswriters, Rice understood that his world might go all to pieces if he ever dared to doubt that his eyes were wired straight to his lower brain...
I suppose you will say the rotten murder has no meaning for a true writer of fiction, and that the real artists in the little magazines are above such temporal things. I wish I could agree, but in fact I think that what happened today is far more meaningful than the entire contents of the little magazines for the past twenty years, and the next twenty, if we get that far...