Top 100 Pete Hamill Quotes
#1. 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
#3. I like to say that journalism is the graduate school from which you never graduate.
Pete Hamill
#4. The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it's not journalism.
Pete Hamill
#5. Any of us who've been newspapermen for a long time hate generalizations.
Pete Hamill
#6. You can't be a reporter using Google. It can be a tool. But you have to get out of the house.
Pete Hamill
#7. Today there are a lot of novelists who seem to be writing to be reviewed, not read.
Pete Hamill
#8. 'The Daily News' and 'Post' gave me my life, and I want to see them survive.
Pete Hamill
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street.
Pete Hamill
#12. The Mafia exists in the American imagination because we want it to exist.
Pete Hamill
#13. 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
#14. Mick Jagger's fans bought records with their allowances. Sinatra's people bought them out of wages.
Pete Hamill
#15. 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
#16. Frank Sinatra was the voice of the 20th-century American city.
Pete Hamill
#17. The background of any artist is shaped by the first 15 years of his or her life.
Pete Hamill
#18. 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
#19. I know second-generation New Yorkers who have never been to Brooklyn;
Pete Hamill
#20. 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
#22. 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
#23. know Brooklynites who have never been to Radio City Music Hall.
Pete Hamill
#24. In 1955, there were 150,000 New Yorkers on welfare; in 1995, there were 1.3 million.
Pete Hamill
#25. 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
#26. New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church.
Pete Hamill
#27. Reaches past her back and holds one of her hands. Silence
Pete Hamill
#28. 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
#29. The most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it's nostalgia.
Pete Hamill
#30. 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
#31. Nothing surprises me, particularly men and their propensity to be fools.
Pete Hamill
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Anybody who sits and says, 'I know New York' is from out of town.
Pete Hamill
#36. 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
#37. Say what you will about him Ed Koch is still the best show in town.
Pete Hamill
#38. Losers are more like the rest of us. They make mistakes they can't take back.
Pete Hamill
#39. I usually wake up at 7, 7:15, without an alarm. I hate the sound of an alarm.
Pete Hamill
#40. She quotes Robert Louis Stevenson about how young writers must read like predators. And she says that all of us, not just writers, must read like predators. For books are food, she said, for every single one of us.
Pete Hamill
#41. 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
#42. I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened.
Pete Hamill
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Travel at least erodes some of the narrowness that exists in each of us.
Pete Hamill
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Confession alone is not necessarily good for the soul.
Pete Hamill
#51. What would Chaucer have written about if men were perfect?
Pete Hamill
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Besides, skin color was skin color, right? It was just the color of your goddamned skin. There was nothing anybody could do about that. You were born with it. Like some people were born with big feet or blue eyes. You didn't make the choice. Your parents did. Or God did.
Pete Hamill
#55. Human beings want to know too much abut each other, and that's why there are so many lies.
Pete Hamill
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. If it's a beautiful day, I love taking walks. The walks are always aimless.
Pete Hamill
#59. You've got to have something in your life you don't sell to others.
Pete Hamill
#60. 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
#61. The Internet has got great tools. How we lived without Google all those years I don't know.
Pete Hamill
#62. I'm not interested in stories about movie stars. I couldn't care less what Steve Martin has on his mind.
Pete Hamill
#64. The spookiest thing I can remember about John Gotti is his eyes.
Pete Hamill
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. For a long time, I was in love with her in that diffuse, ambiguous, and obsessive way that can never be explained to strangers.
Pete Hamill
#68. I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career.
Pete Hamill
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it is unknowable.
Pete Hamill
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else's nostalgia
Pete Hamill
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. The replenishing thing that comes with a nap - you end up with two mornings in a day.
Pete Hamill
#82. 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
#83. For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.
Pete Hamill
#84. 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
#86. 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
#87. The library is a place where most of the things I came to value as an adult had their beginnings.
Pete Hamill
#88. 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
#89. There's nothing more human than selling food to strangers, you know?
Pete Hamill
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis.
Pete Hamill
#93. I was the oldest of seven kids, so I had no older brother who would say, 'Schmuck, don't do that.'
Pete Hamill
#94. You will never have enough space in a tabloid paper to compete with the 'New York Times' on foreign coverage.
Pete Hamill
#95. There's no one New York. There's multiple New Yorks.
Pete Hamill
#96. He looked at her for a long moment, as if remembering unfinished conversations, and then went back to place some damp, slow-burning turf on the fire.
Pete Hamill
#97. There's no way that any tabloid can survive if it doesn't get women to read it.
Pete Hamill
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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