Top 100 Pete Hamill Quotes
#1. There's nothing more human than selling food to strangers, you know?
Pete Hamill
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career.
Pete Hamill
#8. My ambition was to embrace those general qualities that Ernest Hemingway, a former newspaperman, once said should be present in all good books: 'the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.'
Pete Hamill
#9. 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
#10. What would Chaucer have written about if men were perfect?
Pete Hamill
#12. I'm not interested in stories about movie stars. I couldn't care less what Steve Martin has on his mind.
Pete Hamill
#13. The Internet has got great tools. How we lived without Google all those years I don't know.
Pete Hamill
#14. I wanted to sit there forever, drinking in bitter satisfaction, using someone else as a license. In the years that followed, I did a lot of that.
Pete Hamill
#15. If it's a beautiful day, I love taking walks. The walks are always aimless.
Pete Hamill
#16. 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
#17. One thing I learned in this world? Things don't last. People say they do. They don't. Your friends, they die. The wars go on and on and on, then they end. People say they will love each other for the rest of their lives, and they don't.
Pete Hamill
#18. Human beings want to know too much abut each other, and that's why there are so many lies.
Pete Hamill
#19. 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
#20. The best newspapermen I know are those most thrilled by the daily pump of city room excitements; they long fondly for a good murder; they pray that assassinations, wars, catastrophes break on their editions.
Pete Hamill
#21. The spookiest thing I can remember about John Gotti is his eyes.
Pete Hamill
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. There's no way that any tabloid can survive if it doesn't get women to read it.
Pete Hamill
#26. You will never have enough space in a tabloid paper to compete with the 'New York Times' on foreign coverage.
Pete Hamill
#27. There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis.
Pete Hamill
#28. The culture of drink endures because it offers so many rewards: confidence for the shy, clarity for the uncertain, solace to the wounded and lonely, and above all, the elusive promises of friendship and love.
Pete Hamill
#29. 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
#30. The library is a place where most of the things I came to value as an adult had their beginnings.
Pete Hamill
#31. Don't tell me about the world. Not today. It's springtime and they're knocking baseball around fields where the grass is damp and green in the morning and the kids are trying to hit the curve ball.
Pete Hamill
#32. For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.
Pete Hamill
#33. The replenishing thing that comes with a nap - you end up with two mornings in a day.
Pete Hamill
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else's nostalgia
Pete Hamill
#37. 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
#38. I usually wake up at 7, 7:15, without an alarm. I hate the sound of an alarm.
Pete Hamill
#39. 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
#40. In 1955, there were 150,000 New Yorkers on welfare; in 1995, there were 1.3 million.
Pete Hamill
#41. know Brooklynites who have never been to Radio City Music Hall.
Pete Hamill
#42. That was it. To be a rolling stone. In the romantic places of the earth. Ready for a fight, a frolic, or a feed. And since I was Irish, since I was Billy Hamill's son, since I was from Brooklyn: a drink too.
Pete Hamill
#44. 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
#45. The background of any artist is shaped by the first 15 years of his or her life.
Pete Hamill
#46. Frank Sinatra was the voice of the 20th-century American city.
Pete Hamill
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street.
Pete Hamill
#51. There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep growing until I die. This has exasperated my daughters, amused my friends and baffled my accountant. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago, I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer.
Pete Hamill
#52. 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
#53. 'The Daily News' and 'Post' gave me my life, and I want to see them survive.
Pete Hamill
#54. Today there are a lot of novelists who seem to be writing to be reviewed, not read.
Pete Hamill
#55. You can't be a reporter using Google. It can be a tool. But you have to get out of the house.
Pete Hamill
#56. The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it's not journalism.
Pete Hamill
#57. I like to say that journalism is the graduate school from which you never graduate.
Pete Hamill
#59. Mick Jagger's fans bought records with their allowances. Sinatra's people bought them out of wages.
Pete Hamill
#60. 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
#61. The goal is to be both disciplined and loose, so that the writing does not turn into a task or a chore. To leave myself behind, along with the mechanics, and disappear into the lives of my characters.
Pete Hamill
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church.
Pete Hamill
#68. Anybody who sits and says, 'I know New York' is from out of town.
Pete Hamill
#69. 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
#70. The boy admonished himself for wanting everything to be a story. And now realized that some journeys were not stories. On some journeys, nothing really happened. You just kept taking steps.
Pete Hamill
#71. Nothing surprises me, particularly men and their propensity to be fools.
Pete Hamill
#72. I would understand later that baseball was what truly made him an American: the sports pages were more crucial documents than the Constitution.
Pete Hamill
#73. The most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it's nostalgia.
Pete Hamill
#74. 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
#75. This is truly marvelous work full of mystery, nostalgia, joy, The Color of Whimsy.
Pete Hamill
#76. 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
#77. The painting was food. He wanted to caress it, hold it in his hands, lick its glazed surface, plunge into it, dive into the Florentine light. Years vanished, decades were erased, and he was again the boy who had come here to the feast of art.
Pete Hamill
#78. The great novel of twentieth-century New York might be the Daily News.
Pete Hamill
#79. Sentimentality is a false sense of self.
Pete Hamill
#80. Getting out any weekly magazine requires many hours of reading, choosing, discarding, and thinking beyond the obvious.
Pete Hamill
#81. Part of my head will always be in the years after World War II - the five years before Korea started.
Pete Hamill
#82. To love women. To pleasure them, to make them laugh. To be foolish for them. To protect them. To respect them. To listen to them. They are life-givers. To live is to love them.
Pete Hamill
#83. For me reading a book is what I like doing, curled up in a corner in a comfortable chair.
Pete Hamill
#84. Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it's you and the ball.
Pete Hamill
#85. All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser's locker room.
Pete Hamill
#86. I had grown up under the heroic spell of the Abstract Expressionist painters,
Pete Hamill
#87. The challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news.
Pete Hamill
#88. More than anything, it's a game of innocence. Politicians may come and go, but they always get booed at the ballpark.
Pete Hamill
#89. 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
#90. The Irish fought the Italians until they started marrying them. And then they both fought the Jews until they started marrying them.
Pete Hamill
#91. Writing is so entwined with my being that I can't imagine a life without it.
Pete Hamill
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.
Pete Hamill
#95. 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
#96. It's easy to be a tough guy when no one's going to come knocking on your door.
Pete Hamill
#97. 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
#98. New York and Dublin are now suburbs of each other.
Pete Hamill
#99. He tried to imagine the sound of the color red.
Pete Hamill
#100. 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
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