Pete Hamill Quotes
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'The Daily News' and 'Post' gave me my life, and I want to see them survive.
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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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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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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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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 don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career.
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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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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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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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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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Writers are rememberers.
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There's no one New York. There's multiple New Yorks.
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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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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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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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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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There's nothing more human than selling food to strangers, you know?
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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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New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church.
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Nothing surprises me, particularly men and their propensity to be fools.
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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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The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it's not journalism.
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Getting out any weekly magazine requires many hours of reading, choosing, discarding, and thinking beyond the obvious.