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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.
Pete Hamill -
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
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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.
Pete Hamill -
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 -
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.
Pete Hamill -
My parents were Belfast Catholics.
Pete Hamill -
My father lost his leg in 1927 playing soccer. A kick broke his leg; gangrene set in. They sawed it off. So he didn't get what a lot of Irish immigrants got, which was a job on the Waterfront - he didn't get that.
Pete Hamill -
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.
Pete Hamill
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The Mafia exists in the American imagination because we want it to exist.
Pete Hamill -
The replenishing thing that comes with a nap - you end up with two mornings in a day.
Pete Hamill -
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 -
It's easy to be a tough guy when no one's going to come knocking on your door.
Pete Hamill -
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.
Pete Hamill -
Anybody who sits and says, 'I know New York' is from out of town.
Pete Hamill
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Part of my head will always be in the years after World War II - the five years before Korea started.
Pete Hamill -
One of the first things that helped me to understand certain things about writing was seeing 'The Iceman Cometh' in the Village when I was a kid, before I ever became a newspaperman, and realizing that the world I knew could also be the subject of some amazing stuff.
Pete Hamill -
Everybody needs an editor.
Pete Hamill -
You will never have enough space in a tabloid paper to compete with the 'New York Times' on foreign coverage.
Pete Hamill -
Writing is so entwined with my being that I can't imagine a life without it.
Pete Hamill -
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
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I was born in 1935. But my mother and father - who 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 -
I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.
Pete Hamill -
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 -
I think if you had to choose between running a tabloid and being president of the United States, of course you'd run the tabloid, especially in New York.
Pete Hamill