Pete Hamill Quotes

Say what you will about him Ed Koch is still the best show in town.

Travel at least erodes some of the narrowness that exists in each of us.

The Anarchists set off World War I with a gunshot in Sarajevo – but they faded away. It wasn’t that the police drove them out of business. The ideology had nowhere to go except into permanent negativity.

My father did shape me. He didn’t drive because he had one leg, and for years I never drove. I had no mobility.

I was born in 1935. But my mother and father – who were immigrants from Ireland – and everybody that I knew growing up in Brooklyn came out of the Depression, and they were remarkable people.

I like to say that journalism is the graduate school from which you never graduate.

There’s no way that any tabloid can survive if it doesn’t get women to read it.

I was the oldest of seven kids, so I had no older brother who would say, ‘Schmuck, don’t do that.’

I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine – you mourn things that actually happened.

Sinatra‘s endurance has become a rallying point for many people who feel that their sacrifices and hard work are no longer honored.

As a master of graphic creation, as teacher, historian, and roving ambassador of comics, Jerry Robinson has ensured that future generations of talented kids will continue to imagine and then put marks on paper.

The most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it’s nostalgia.

In 1962, I wrote a series about 42nd Street called ‘Welcome to Lostville.’ One result was that the young Bob Dylan read it and invited me to his first concert at Town Hall; the result was a kind of friendship that years later led to my liner notes for ‘Blood on the Tracks.’

Viewers can’t work or play while watching television; they can’t read; they can’t be out on the streets, falling in love with the wrong people, learning how to quarrel and compromise with other human beings. In short, they are asocial.

Everybody needs an editor.

Amazon.com isn’t the same as going down an aisle. The same as record stores. You’ll go for Billie Holiday, and you buy Gustav Mahler as you’re going out the door.

For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.

There’s nothing more human than selling food to strangers, you know?

Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it’s you and the ball.

Leon Uris is a storyteller, in a direct line from those men who sat around fires in the days before history and made the tribe more human.

Getting out any weekly magazine requires many hours of reading, choosing, discarding, and thinking beyond the obvious.

The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street.

Boxing is one of those leftovers from a more primitive past that should be finished off and killed. I don’t love it anymore.

Bootleggers were romanticized by people like F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example. Gatsby is a bootlegger. And they were not thought of as evil criminals in the newspapers, either. There was a certain amount of affection for them.

All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser‘s locker room.

The Tammany guys, many of them were corrupt. They were still around when I was a boy. You knew the Tammany guys’ name.

Reporters now are better educated than the crowd I knew when I broke in. We still had guys shaped by Prohibition and the Depression, so the news business still had badly paid people who loved it for the life, because every day was different.

If you’re the oldest in a large family, you tend to do everything yourself, particularly if you are the first American. You begin a habit or pattern that makes it easy to reject other help.

Anybody who sits and says, ‘I know New York’ is from out of town.

I’m so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers.

As a reporter, going around, you hear stories you can’t prove, which means you can’t put them in the newspaper. But they’re good stories, and I would jot them down thinking maybe one day I could write that as a short story.

When I was a kid, I could draw, and my ambition was to be a cartoonist. I wanted to draw comics. But I also liked newspaper comics.

New York and Dublin are now suburbs of each other.

Any of us who’ve been newspapermen for a long time hate generalizations.

Writers are rememberers.

New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church.

Nothing surprises me, particularly men and their propensity to be fools.

The spookiest thing I can remember about John Gotti is his eyes.

The Mafia exists in the American imagination because we want it to exist.

There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis.

My parents were Belfast Catholics.

‘The Daily News’ and ‘Post‘ gave me my life, and I want to see them survive.

At the beginning of writing fiction, too much of the newspaper style was getting into the prose, so I thought, ‘Gee, I should try writing longhand. Maybe I can tap something that goes back to the point before I could type.’

Vietnam should have taught us that mindless anti-Communism is not a cause worth killing or dying for in a world in which Communism is hardly a monolithic force.

If you ask me, I think 12-step programs are perfectly valid, can be an enormous help. But it depends on the individual.

What would Chaucer have written about if men were perfect?

We’re in an age when everything’s present tense. People don’t know how to be still and surrender to the music.

In the 1950s, when I was hanging around Sullivan’s Gym and the Gramercy Gym, there were fixed fights. Mob guys like Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo had taken over the sport; one lightweight champion loaned his title to others at least twice; the welterweight division was a slag heap.

Sentimentality is a false sense of self.

One thing I learned working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard was to be on time. If the day begins at 8 A.M., be there early, get there, punch the time clock; don’t just stand there like an oaf.

The replenishing thing that comes with a nap – you end up with two mornings in a day.

Across the years, in spite of everything I knew, my passion endured. Newspapers and magazines paid me to cover fights when I’d have paid my own way.

It’s easy to be a tough guy when no one’s going to come knocking on your door.

The Irish fought the Italians until they started marrying them. And then they both fought the Jews until they started marrying them.

I’ve lived in other cities – Rome, Dublin, Mexico City – but I was born in New York City, and I always lived in those other places as a New Yorker.