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.Collection: Independence
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.Collection: Morning
For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.Collection: Imagination
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.'Collection: Friendship
The most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it's nostalgia.Collection: Anger
Everybody needs an editor.
The replenishing thing that comes with a nap - you end up with two mornings in a day.
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.
If it's a beautiful day, I love taking walks. The walks are always aimless.
Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language.
It's easy to be a tough guy when no one's going to come knocking on your door.
To me, doctors and nurses and teachers are heroes, doing often infinitely more difficult work than the more flamboyant kind of a hero.
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.
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.
You can't be a reporter using Google. It can be a tool. But you have to get out of the house.
New York and Dublin are now suburbs of each other.
Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it's you and the ball.
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.
Say what you will about him Ed Koch is still the best show in town.
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.
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.
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.
I was the oldest of seven kids, so I had no older brother who would say, 'Schmuck, don't do that.'
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.
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.
Boxing is one of those leftovers from a more primitive past that should be finished off and killed. I don't love it anymore.
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.
The Tammany guys, many of them were corrupt. They were still around when I was a boy. You knew the Tammany guys' name.
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.
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.
For me reading a book is what I like doing, curled up in a corner in a comfortable chair.
Confession alone is not necessarily good for the soul.
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.
My father did shape me. He didn't drive because he had one leg, and for years I never drove. I had no mobility.
I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened.
I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.
My parents were Belfast Catholics.
When I was in the navy, I wanted to go to Paris and the Academie Julian. I never did. Mexico City took me instead.
I like to say that journalism is the graduate school from which you never graduate.
Writing is so entwined with my being that I can't imagine a life without it.
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.
Getting out any weekly magazine requires many hours of reading, choosing, discarding, and thinking beyond the obvious.
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.
The challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news.
I'm so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers.
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.
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.
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.
There's no one New York. There's multiple New Yorks.
Anybody who sits and says, 'I know New York' is from out of town.