Pete Hamill Quotes
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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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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 odyssey is not going out and seeing the world: it's about trying to get home. It's home to the woman you love.
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I was the oldest of seven kids, so I had no older brother who would say, 'Schmuck, don't do that.'
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The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Anybody who sits and says, 'I know New York' is from out of town.
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Losers are more like the rest of us. They make mistakes they can't take back.
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There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis.
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Confession alone is not necessarily good for the soul.
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The Internet has got great tools. How we lived without Google all those years I don't know.
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All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser's locker room.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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People become writers in the first place by those things that hurt you into art, as Yeats said it. Then they become separated from what started out affecting them. Journalism forces you to look at the world so you don't get cut off.
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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.
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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.