George Plimpton
George Plimpton
George Ames Plimptonwas an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review. He was also famous for "participatory journalism" which included competing in professional sporting events, acting in a Western, performing a comedy act at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and playing with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and then recording the experience from the point of view of an amateur...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth18 March 1927
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
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.
Rick Bass is one of the best writers of his generation.
I was told just today that 60,000 or 70,000 people listen to this (Audible.com site), which on personal computers strikes me as an extraordinary number, ... Maybe with this 'Pet Peeves' book, it'll be 150,000.
I think people are aware of how varied and interesting his life was-always at the center of things-as well as aspects of his decline.
He was interviewed in the early '60s by a young novelist, Pati Hill.
Writing is a very lonely business and when you come to a book fair and you sit at a table and people come up to you with books that they've had in their library for many years and they think it's been somewhat enhanced by a signature, it's always a pleasure.
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.
It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.
My favorite monologue in the book is Kate Harrington's story of her relationship with Truman.
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.
Give me good books, good conversations, and my Trek Y-Foil, and I shall want for nothing else.
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.
The smaller the ball used in the sport, the better the book.
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.