Pete Hamill Quotes
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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.
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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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My parents were Belfast Catholics.
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As a reporter, going around, you hear stories you can't prove, which means you can't put them in the newspaper. But they're good stories, and I would jot them down thinking maybe one day I could write that as a short story.
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Nothing surprises me, particularly men and their propensity to be fools.
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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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My father did shape me. He didn't drive because he had one leg, and for years I never drove. I had no mobility.
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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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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.
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When I was a kid, I could draw, and my ambition was to be a cartoonist. I wanted to draw comics. But I also liked newspaper comics.
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It's odd being an American now. Most of us are peaceful, but here we are again, in our fifth major war of this century.
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It's easy to be a tough guy when no one's going to come knocking on your door.
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In 1962, I wrote a series about 42nd Street called 'Welcome to Lostville.' One result was that the young Bob Dylan read it and invited me to his first concert at Town Hall; the result was a kind of friendship that years later led to my liner notes for 'Blood on the Tracks.'
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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.
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I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened.
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Viewers can't work or play while watching television; they can't read; they can't be out on the streets, falling in love with the wrong people, learning how to quarrel and compromise with other human beings. In short, they are asocial.
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There's no one New York. There's multiple New Yorks.
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Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language.
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Sentimentality is a false sense of self.
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In the 1950s, when I was hanging around Sullivan's Gym and the Gramercy Gym, there were fixed fights. Mob guys like Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo had taken over the sport; one lightweight champion loaned his title to others at least twice; the welterweight division was a slag heap.
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New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church.
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The spookiest thing I can remember about John Gotti is his eyes.
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Getting out any weekly magazine requires many hours of reading, choosing, discarding, and thinking beyond the obvious.