Pete Hamill Quotes
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Everybody needs an editor.
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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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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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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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It's easy to be a tough guy when no one's going to come knocking on your door.
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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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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.
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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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Vietnam should have taught us that nationalism, with its engines of independence and self-determination, is a more powerful force by far than Marxism and must be understood and respected.
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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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What would Chaucer have written about if men were perfect?
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Nothing surprises me, particularly men and their propensity to be fools.
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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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Sentimentality is a false sense of self.
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Writers are rememberers.
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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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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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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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There's no one New York. There's multiple New Yorks.
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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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The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it's not journalism.
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The spookiest thing I can remember about John Gotti is his eyes.
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New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church.