“I don’t ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.”
― Pete Hamill
“If it’s a beautiful day, I love taking walks. The walks are always aimless.”
― Pete Hamill
“I usually wake up at 7, 7:15, without an alarm. I hate the sound of an alarm.”
― Pete Hamill
“For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.”
― Pete Hamill
“In my experience, growing up in Brooklyn and all that, the real tough guys didn’t act tough. They didn’t talk tough. They were tough, you know? I think about these politicians who try to pose as tough guys – it makes me laugh.”
― Pete Hamill
“Vietnam should have taught us that mindless anti-Communism is not a cause worth killing or dying for in a world in which Communism is hardly a monolithic force.”
― Pete Hamill
“Confession alone is not necessarily good for the soul.”
― Pete Hamill
“The Anarchists set off World War I with a gunshot in Sarajevo – but they faded away. It wasn’t that the police drove them out of business. The ideology had nowhere to go except into permanent negativity.”
― Pete Hamill
“The replenishing thing that comes with a nap – you end up with two mornings in a day.”
― Pete Hamill
“It’s easy to be a tough guy when no one’s going to come knocking on your door.”
― Pete Hamill
“Any of us who’ve been newspapermen for a long time hate generalizations.”
― Pete Hamill
“I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine – you mourn things that actually happened.”
― Pete Hamill
“Everybody who went to Vietnam carries his or her own version of the war. Only 10 percent engaged in combat; the American elephant, pursuing the Vietnamese grasshopper, was extraordinarily heavy with logistical support.”
― Pete Hamill
“The Irish fought the Italians until they started marrying them. And then they both fought the Jews until they started marrying them.”
― Pete Hamill
“Everybody needs an editor.”
― Pete Hamill
“The Internet has got great tools. How we lived without Google all those years I don’t know.”
― Pete Hamill
“An independent Brooklyn probably would have built a new stadium for the Dodgers, so today there might be not just baseball but also the only football team on this side of the Hudson.”
― Pete Hamill
“What would Chaucer have written about if men were perfect?”
― Pete Hamill
“The Mafia exists in the American imagination because we want it to exist.”
― Pete Hamill
“Sinatra slowly found a way to allow tenderness into the performance while remaining manly. He perfected the role of the Tender Tough Guy and passed it on to several generations of Americans. Before him, that archetype did not exist in American popular culture.”
― Pete Hamill
“You can’t edit yesterday’s paper.”
― Pete Hamill
“He steps on stage and draws the sword of rhetoric, and when he is through, someone is lying wounded and thousands of others are either angry or consoled.”
― Pete Hamill
“Say what you will about him Ed Koch is still the best show in town.”
― Pete Hamill
“There is a growing feeling that perhaps Texas is really another country, a place where the skies, the disasters, the diamonds, the politicians, the women, the fortunes, the football players and the murders are all bigger than anywhere else.”
― Pete Hamill
“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.”
― Pete Hamill
“I’ve lived in other cities – Rome, Dublin, Mexico City – but I was born in New York City, and I always lived in those other places as a New Yorker.”
― Pete Hamill
“I was the oldest of seven kids, so I had no older brother who would say, ‘Schmuck, don’t do that.’”
― Pete Hamill
“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.”
― Pete Hamill
“Too many people take New York for granted. The primary reason is that history is not taught. That’s outrageous in a city where the past is still visible.”
― Pete Hamill
“Boxing is one of those leftovers from a more primitive past that should be finished off and killed. I don’t love it anymore.”
― Pete Hamill
“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.”
― Pete Hamill
“The Tammany guys, many of them were corrupt. They were still around when I was a boy. You knew the Tammany guys’ name.”
― Pete Hamill
“Bootleggers were romanticized by people like F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example. Gatsby is a bootlegger. And they were not thought of as evil criminals in the newspapers, either. There was a certain amount of affection for them.”
― Pete Hamill
“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.”
― Pete Hamill
“For me reading a book is what I like doing, curled up in a corner in a comfortable chair.”
― Pete Hamill
“People become writers in the first place by those things that hurt you into art, as Yeats said it. Then they become separated from what started out affecting them. Journalism forces you to look at the world so you don’t get cut off.”
― Pete Hamill
“If you’re the oldest in a large family, you tend to do everything yourself, particularly if you are the first American. You begin a habit or pattern that makes it easy to reject other help.”
― Pete Hamill
“My father did shape me. He didn’t drive because he had one leg, and for years I never drove. I had no mobility.”
― Pete Hamill
“To me, doctors and nurses and teachers are heroes, doing often infinitely more difficult work than the more flamboyant kind of a hero.”
― Pete Hamill
“The odyssey is not going out and seeing the world: it’s about trying to get home. It’s home to the woman you love.”
― Pete Hamill
“I couldn’t have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.”
― Pete Hamill
“My parents were Belfast Catholics.”
― Pete Hamill
“When I was in the navy, I wanted to go to Paris and the Academie Julian. I never did. Mexico City took me instead.”
― Pete Hamill
“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.’”
― Pete Hamill
“I like to say that journalism is the graduate school from which you never graduate.”
― Pete Hamill
“Writing is so entwined with my being that I can’t imagine a life without it.”
― Pete Hamill
“Usually, I work every day, seven days a week. When I go three days without writing, my body aches with anxiety; my mood is irritable. My night dreams grow wild with unconscious invention.”
― Pete Hamill
“Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language.”
― Pete Hamill
“Getting out any weekly magazine requires many hours of reading, choosing, discarding, and thinking beyond the obvious.”
― Pete Hamill
“Every reporter inhales skepticism. You interview people, and they lie. You face public figures, diligently making notes or taping what is said, and they perform their interviews to fit a calculated script. The truth, alas, is always elusive.”
― Pete Hamill
“The challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news.”
― Pete Hamill
“I’m so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers.”
― Pete Hamill
“The Huffingtonpost.com does not pay its writers. Tina Brown’s thedailybeast.com does pay its writers. You have to be paid because this is not a hobby. You have to keep that standard. You can’t ask grandpa to loan you money because you have to go to Afghanistan. I walked the picket line for that to continue.”
― Pete Hamill
“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.”
― Pete Hamill
“There’s no one New York. There’s multiple New Yorks.”
― Pete Hamill
“Anybody who sits and says, ‘I know New York’ is from out of town.”
― Pete Hamill
“Part of my head will always be in the years after World War II – the five years before Korea started.”
― Pete Hamill
“There are a lot of very good New York novels, but there’s no single all-encompassing novel, the way you could look at any number of Dickens books and say we know London as a result of that.”
― Pete Hamill
“One thing that I notice that is changing, you don’t see kids on Sunday. Most of them are home. The kids are having much more virtual childhoods instead of childhoods. They don’t play ball or hang out with the wrong people or get in fistfights, all the things that once made childhood. I don’t know how it’s going to turn out.”
― Pete Hamill
“The most successful terrorist group in the United States for almost 70 years was the Ku Klux Klan. They hated Catholics, Jews, and blacks. They were prone to violence.”
― Pete Hamill
“The spookiest thing I can remember about John Gotti is his eyes.”
― Pete Hamill
“The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street.”
― Pete Hamill
“There’s nothing more human than selling food to strangers, you know?”
― Pete Hamill
“Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it’s you and the ball.”
― Pete Hamill
“Amazon.com isn’t the same as going down an aisle. The same as record stores. You’ll go for Billie Holiday, and you buy Gustav Mahler as you’re going out the door.”
― Pete Hamill
“You can’t be a reporter using Google. It can be a tool. But you have to get out of the house.”
― Pete Hamill
“The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it’s not journalism.”
― Pete Hamill
“Sentimentality is a false sense of self.”
― Pete Hamill
“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.”
― Pete Hamill
“In the newspaper business, I was in the last generation before the arrival of the personnel manager. You were hired by editors – and editors who would take a chance on what they perceived to be talent and not hire a resume.”
― Pete Hamill
“Travel at least erodes some of the narrowness that exists in each of us.”
― Pete Hamill
“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.”
― Pete Hamill
“Sinatra’s endurance has become a rallying point for many people who feel that their sacrifices and hard work are no longer honored.”
― Pete Hamill
“Mick Jagger’s fans bought records with their allowances. Sinatra’s people bought them out of wages.”
― Pete Hamill
“Writers are rememberers.”
― Pete Hamill
“Reporters now are better educated than the crowd I knew when I broke in. We still had guys shaped by Prohibition and the Depression, so the news business still had badly paid people who loved it for the life, because every day was different.”
― Pete Hamill
“In the ’70s, the newspaper guild managed to get people paid what they were worth, but the reporters suddenly became middle class. It’s much more respectable, more uptight, and everyone speaks in guarded tones. And the writing isn’t as good. We always had guys who were failed poets and failed novelists who did it to eat.”
― Pete Hamill
“For years, the defenders of television have argued that the networks are only giving the people what they want. That might be true. But so is the Medellin cartel.”
― Pete Hamill
“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.”
― Pete Hamill
“Leon Uris is a storyteller, in a direct line from those men who sat around fires in the days before history and made the tribe more human.”
― Pete Hamill
“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.”
― Pete Hamill
“Across the years, in spite of everything I knew, my passion endured. Newspapers and magazines paid me to cover fights when I’d have paid my own way.”
― Pete Hamill
“New York and Dublin are now suburbs of each other.”
― Pete Hamill
“There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis.”
― Pete Hamill
“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.”
― Pete Hamill
“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.’”
― Pete Hamill
“If you ask me, I think 12-step programs are perfectly valid, can be an enormous help. But it depends on the individual.”
― Pete Hamill
“I don’t think enough journalists read enough – literature, history. You’ve got to keep reading all through your career.”
― Pete Hamill
“You’ve got to have something in your life you don’t sell to others.”
― Pete Hamill
“Nothing surprises me, particularly men and their propensity to be fools.”
― Pete Hamill
“Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a newspaperman originally in Colombia. He talked about – and I agree – how everybody has a public life, a private life, and a secret life.”
― Pete Hamill
“’The Daily News’ and ‘Post’ gave me my life, and I want to see them survive.”
― Pete Hamill
“There’s no way that any tabloid can survive if it doesn’t get women to read it.”
― Pete Hamill
“I’m not interested in stories about movie stars. I couldn’t care less what Steve Martin has on his mind.”
― Pete Hamill
“We’re in an age when everything’s present tense. People don’t know how to be still and surrender to the music.”
― Pete Hamill
“All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser’s locker room.”
― Pete Hamill
“Losers are more like the rest of us. They make mistakes they can’t take back.”
― Pete Hamill
“The most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it’s nostalgia.”
― Pete Hamill
“The background of any artist is shaped by the first 15 years of his or her life.”
― Pete Hamill
“One of the first things that helped me to understand certain things about writing was seeing ‘The Iceman Cometh’ in the Village when I was a kid, before I ever became a newspaperman, and realizing that the world I knew could also be the subject of some amazing stuff.”
― Pete Hamill
“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.”
― Pete Hamill
“New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church.”
― Pete Hamill
“You will never have enough space in a tabloid paper to compete with the ‘New York Times’ on foreign coverage.”
― Pete Hamill
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