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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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The replenishing thing that comes with a nap - you end up with two mornings in a day.
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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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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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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 always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened.
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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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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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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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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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New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church.
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Sentimentality is a false sense of self.
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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.