Pete Hamill Quotes
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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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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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Writers are rememberers.
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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 nothing more human than selling food to strangers, you know?
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Getting out any weekly magazine requires many hours of reading, choosing, discarding, and thinking beyond the obvious.
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New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church.
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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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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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Nothing surprises me, particularly men and their propensity to be fools.
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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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Sentimentality is a false sense of self.
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The Irish fought the Italians until they started marrying them. And then they both fought the Jews until they started marrying them.