Pete Hamill Quotes
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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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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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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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At the beginning of writing fiction, too much of the newspaper style was getting into the prose, so I thought, 'Gee, I should try writing longhand. Maybe I can tap something that goes back to the point before I could type.'
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The challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news.
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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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You will never have enough space in a tabloid paper to compete with the 'New York Times' on foreign coverage.
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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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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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'The Daily News' and 'Post' gave me my life, and I want to see them survive.
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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.
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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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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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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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I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career.
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Mick Jagger's fans bought records with their allowances. Sinatra's people bought them out of wages.
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One thing I learned working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard was to be on time. If the day begins at 8 A.M., be there early, get there, punch the time clock; don't just stand there like an oaf.
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I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.
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You've got to have something in your life you don't sell to others.
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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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Everybody needs an editor.
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There's nothing more human than selling food to strangers, you know?
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There's no way that any tabloid can survive if it doesn't get women to read it.