Pete Hamill Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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 Huffingtonpost.com does not pay its writers. Tina Brown's thedailybeast.com does pay its writers. You have to be paid because this is not a hobby. You have to keep that standard. You can't ask grandpa to loan you money because you have to go to Afghanistan. I walked the picket line for that to continue.
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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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There is a growing feeling that perhaps Texas is really another country, a place where the skies, the disasters, the diamonds, the politicians, the women, the fortunes, the football players and the murders are all bigger than anywhere else.
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Writing is so entwined with my being that I can't imagine a life without it.
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Sinatra's endurance has become a rallying point for many people who feel that their sacrifices and hard work are no longer honored.
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The challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news.
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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.
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The replenishing thing that comes with a nap - you end up with two mornings in a day.
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You've got to have something in your life you don't sell to others.
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'The Daily News' and 'Post' gave me my life, and I want to see them survive.
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I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.
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You will never have enough space in a tabloid paper to compete with the 'New York Times' on foreign coverage.
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There's no way that any tabloid can survive if it doesn't get women to read it.
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My parents were Belfast Catholics.
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Part of my head will always be in the years after World War II - the five years before Korea started.
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We're in an age when everything's present tense. People don't know how to be still and surrender to the music.
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Usually, I work every day, seven days a week. When I go three days without writing, my body aches with anxiety; my mood is irritable. My night dreams grow wild with unconscious invention.
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Everybody needs an editor.
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The Mafia exists in the American imagination because we want it to exist.
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I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career.
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I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened.