Pete Hamill

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.

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.

Sentimentality is a false sense of self.

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.

When I was in the navy, I wanted to go to Paris and the Academie Julian. I never did. Mexico City took me instead.

For me reading a book is what I like doing, curled up in a corner in a comfortable chair.

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.

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.

The Internet has got great tools. How we lived without Google all those years I don't know.

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.

I'm so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers.

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.

Confession alone is not necessarily good for the soul.

I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.

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.'

I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened.

Writing is so entwined with my being that I can't imagine a life without it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Tammany guys, many of them were corrupt. They were still around when I was a boy. You knew the Tammany guys' name.

The Irish fought the Italians until they started marrying them. And then they both fought the Jews until they started marrying them.

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.

Sinatra's endurance has become a rallying point for many people who feel that their sacrifices and hard work are no longer honored.

Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it's you and the ball.

Getting out any weekly magazine requires many hours of reading, choosing, discarding, and thinking beyond the obvious.

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.

The challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news.

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.

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.

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.

There's no one New York. There's multiple New Yorks.

Travel at least erodes some of the narrowness that exists in each of us.

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.

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.

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.

I was the oldest of seven kids, so I had no older brother who would say, 'Schmuck, don't do that.'

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.

I usually wake up at 7, 7:15, without an alarm. I hate the sound of an alarm.

Mick Jagger's fans bought records with their allowances. Sinatra's people bought them out of wages.

If it's a beautiful day, I love taking walks. The walks are always aimless.

Anybody who sits and says, 'I know New York' is from out of town.

Any of us who've been newspapermen for a long time hate generalizations.

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.

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.

The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it's not journalism.

The Mafia exists in the American imagination because we want it to exist.

I like to say that journalism is the graduate school from which you never graduate.

It's easy to be a tough guy when no one's going to come knocking on your door.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's nothing more human than selling food to strangers, you know?

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.

The spookiest thing I can remember about John Gotti is his eyes.

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.

To me, doctors and nurses and teachers are heroes, doing often infinitely more difficult work than the more flamboyant kind of a hero.

Boxing is one of those leftovers from a more primitive past that should be finished off and killed. I don't love it anymore.

Say what you will about him Ed Koch is still the best show in town.

Writers are rememberers.

The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street.

You can't be a reporter using Google. It can be a tool. But you have to get out of the house.

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.

Everybody needs an editor.

My father did shape me. He didn't drive because he had one leg, and for years I never drove. I had no mobility.

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.

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.

The replenishing thing that comes with a nap - you end up with two mornings in a day.

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.

My parents were Belfast Catholics.

Part of my head will always be in the years after World War II - the five years before Korea started.

Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language.

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.

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.