Pete Hamill
Part of my head will always be in the years after World War II - the five years before Korea started.
The Irish fought the Italians until they started marrying them. And then they both fought the Jews until they started marrying them.
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.
I usually wake up at 7, 7:15, without an alarm. I hate the sound of an alarm.
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.
Any of us who've been newspapermen for a long time hate generalizations.
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.
The spookiest thing I can remember about John Gotti is his eyes.
The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street.
There's nothing more human than selling food to strangers, you know?
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.
The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it's not journalism.
The Internet has got great tools. How we lived without Google all those years I don't know.
Sentimentality is a false sense of self.
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.
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.
Travel at least erodes some of the narrowness that exists in each of us.
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.
Sinatra's endurance has become a rallying point for many people who feel that their sacrifices and hard work are no longer honored.
Mick Jagger's fans bought records with their allowances. Sinatra's people bought them out of wages.
Writers are rememberers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis.
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.
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.'
If you ask me, I think 12-step programs are perfectly valid, can be an enormous help. But it depends on the individual.
I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career.
You've got to have something in your life you don't sell to others.
Nothing surprises me, particularly men and their propensity to be fools.
What would Chaucer have written about if men were perfect?
'The Daily News' and 'Post' gave me my life, and I want to see them survive.
There's no way that any tabloid can survive if it doesn't get women to read it.
I'm not interested in stories about movie stars. I couldn't care less what Steve Martin has on his mind.
We're in an age when everything's present tense. People don't know how to be still and surrender to the music.
The Mafia exists in the American imagination because we want it to exist.
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.
All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser's locker room.
Losers are more like the rest of us. They make mistakes they can't take back.
The background of any artist is shaped by the first 15 years of his or her life.
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.
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.
New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church.