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Pete Hamill Quotes

We’ve collected the best Pete Hamill Quotes. Use them as an inspiration.

1
Say what you will about him Ed Koch is still the best show in town.
Pete Hamill
2
Travel at least erodes some of the narrowness that exists in each of us.
Pete Hamill
3
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.
Pete Hamill
4
My father did shape me. He didn’t drive because he had one leg, and for years I never drove. I had no mobility.
Pete Hamill
5
I was born in 1935. But my mother and fatherwho were immigrants from Ireland – and everybody that I knew growing up in Brooklyn came out of the Depression, and they were remarkable people.
Pete Hamill
6
I like to say that journalism is the graduate school from which you never graduate.
Pete Hamill
7
There’s no way that any tabloid can survive if it doesn’t get women to read it.
Pete Hamill
8
I was the oldest of seven kids, so I had no older brother who would say, ‘Schmuck, don’t do that.’
Pete Hamill
9
Pete Hamill
10
Sinatra‘s endurance has become a rallying point for many people who feel that their sacrifices and hard work are no longer honored.
Pete Hamill
11
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.
Pete Hamill
12
The most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it’s nostalgia.
Pete Hamill
13
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.’
Pete Hamill
14
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.
Pete Hamill
15
Everybody needs an editor.
Pete Hamill
16
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.
Pete Hamill
17
Pete Hamill
18
There’s nothing more human than selling food to strangers, you know?
Pete Hamill
19
Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it’s you and the ball.
Pete Hamill
20
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.
Pete Hamill
21
Getting out any weekly magazine requires many hours of reading, choosing, discarding, and thinking beyond the obvious.
Pete Hamill
22
The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street.
Pete Hamill
23
Boxing is one of those leftovers from a more primitive past that should be finished off and killed. I don’t love it anymore.
Pete Hamill
24
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.
Pete Hamill
25
All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser‘s locker room.
Pete Hamill
26
The Tammany guys, many of them were corrupt. They were still around when I was a boy. You knew the Tammany guys’ name.
Pete Hamill
27
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.
Pete Hamill
28
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.
Pete Hamill
29
Anybody who sits and says, ‘I know New York’ is from out of town.
Pete Hamill
30
I’m so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers.
Pete Hamill
31
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.
Pete Hamill
32
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.
Pete Hamill
33
New York and Dublin are now suburbs of each other.
Pete Hamill
34
Any of us who’ve been newspapermen for a long time hate generalizations.
Pete Hamill
35
Writers are rememberers.
Pete Hamill
36
New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church.
Pete Hamill
37
Nothing surprises me, particularly men and their propensity to be fools.
Pete Hamill
38
The spookiest thing I can remember about John Gotti is his eyes.
Pete Hamill
39
The Mafia exists in the American imagination because we want it to exist.
Pete Hamill
40
There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis.
Pete Hamill
41
Pete Hamill
42
‘The Daily News’ and ‘Postgave me my life, and I want to see them survive.
Pete Hamill
43
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.’
Pete Hamill
44
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.
Pete Hamill
45
If you ask me, I think 12-step programs are perfectly valid, can be an enormous help. But it depends on the individual.
Pete Hamill
46
What would Chaucer have written about if men were perfect?
Pete Hamill
47
We’re in an age when everything’s present tense. People don’t know how to be still and surrender to the music.
Pete Hamill
48
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.
Pete Hamill
49
Sentimentality is a false sense of self.
Pete Hamill
50
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.
Pete Hamill
51
The replenishing thing that comes with a nap – you end up with two mornings in a day.

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