Pete Hamill Quotes
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To me, doctors and nurses and teachers are heroes, doing often infinitely more difficult work than the more flamboyant kind of a hero.
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In the '70s, the newspaper guild managed to get people paid what they were worth, but the reporters suddenly became middle class. It's much more respectable, more uptight, and everyone speaks in guarded tones. And the writing isn't as good. We always had guys who were failed poets and failed novelists who did it to eat.
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You can't be a reporter using Google. It can be a tool. But you have to get out of the house.
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In my experience, growing up in Brooklyn and all that, the real tough guys didn't act tough. They didn't talk tough. They were tough, you know? I think about these politicians who try to pose as tough guys - it makes me laugh.
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Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it's you and the ball.
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The most successful terrorist group in the United States for almost 70 years was the Ku Klux Klan. They hated Catholics, Jews, and blacks. They were prone to violence.
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Travel at least erodes some of the narrowness that exists in each of us.
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I usually wake up at 7, 7:15, without an alarm. I hate the sound of an alarm.
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I'm so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers.
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Everybody who went to Vietnam carries his or her own version of the war. Only 10 percent engaged in combat; the American elephant, pursuing the Vietnamese grasshopper, was extraordinarily heavy with logistical support.
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The most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it's nostalgia.
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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.
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For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.
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Say what you will about him Ed Koch is still the best show in town.
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Any of us who've been newspapermen for a long time hate generalizations.
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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.
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When I was in the navy, I wanted to go to Paris and the Academie Julian. I never did. Mexico City took me instead.
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New York and Dublin are now suburbs of each other.
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Anybody who sits and says, 'I know New York' is from out of town.
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I like to say that journalism is the graduate school from which you never graduate.
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If it's a beautiful day, I love taking walks. The walks are always aimless.
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Sinatra slowly found a way to allow tenderness into the performance while remaining manly. He perfected the role of the Tender Tough Guy and passed it on to several generations of Americans. Before him, that archetype did not exist in American popular culture.
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The background of any artist is shaped by the first 15 years of his or her life.
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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.