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The background of any artist is shaped by the first 15 years of his or her life.
Pete Hamill -
One thing that I notice that is changing, you don't see kids on Sunday. Most of them are home. The kids are having much more virtual childhoods instead of childhoods. They don't play ball or hang out with the wrong people or get in fistfights, all the things that once made childhood. I don't know how it's going to turn out.
Pete Hamill
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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.
Pete Hamill -
I was the oldest of seven kids, so I had no older brother who would say, 'Schmuck, don't do that.'
Pete Hamill -
The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street.
Pete Hamill -
He steps on stage and draws the sword of rhetoric, and when he is through, someone is lying wounded and thousands of others are either angry or consoled.
Pete Hamill -
There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis.
Pete Hamill -
Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a newspaperman originally in Colombia. He talked about - and I agree - how everybody has a public life, a private life, and a secret life.
Pete Hamill
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Confession alone is not necessarily good for the soul.
Pete Hamill -
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.
Pete Hamill -
Losers are more like the rest of us. They make mistakes they can't take back.
Pete Hamill -
All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser's locker room.
Pete Hamill -
Every reporter inhales skepticism. You interview people, and they lie. You face public figures, diligently making notes or taping what is said, and they perform their interviews to fit a calculated script. The truth, alas, is always elusive.
Pete Hamill -
There are a lot of very good New York novels, but there's no single all-encompassing novel, the way you could look at any number of Dickens books and say we know London as a result of that.
Pete Hamill
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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 -
Too many people take New York for granted. The primary reason is that history is not taught. That's outrageous in a city where the past is still visible.
Pete Hamill -
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 -
The Internet has got great tools. How we lived without Google all those years I don't know.
Pete Hamill -
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 -
An independent Brooklyn probably would have built a new stadium for the Dodgers, so today there might be not just baseball but also the only football team on this side of the Hudson.
Pete Hamill
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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 -
For years, the defenders of television have argued that the networks are only giving the people what they want. That might be true. But so is the Medellin cartel.
Pete Hamill -
The challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news.
Pete Hamill -
There's no way that any tabloid can survive if it doesn't get women to read it.
Pete Hamill