Top 124 Quotes & Sayings by Pete Hamill - Page 2

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.

Nothing surprises me, particularly men and their propensity to be fools.

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.

New York and Dublin are now suburbs of each other.

I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career.

I'm not interested in stories about movie stars. I couldn't care less what Steve Martin has on his mind.

What would Chaucer have written about if men were perfect?

There's no way that any tabloid can survive if it doesn't get women to read it.

All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser's locker room.

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

'The Daily News' and 'Post' gave me my life, and I want to see them survive.

You've got to have something in your life you don't sell to others.

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.

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

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.

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

Sentimentality is a false sense of self.

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

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.

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.

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.

The background of any artist is shaped by the first 15 years of his or her life.

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

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.

Writers are rememberers.

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.

There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis.

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

Losers are more like the rest of us. They make mistakes they can't take back.

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

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.

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

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.

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

If you ask me, I think 12-step programs are perfectly valid, can be an enormous help. But it depends on the individual.

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.'

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.

You will never have enough space in a tabloid paper to compete with the 'New York Times' on foreign coverage.

Everybody needs an editor.

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.

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.

You can't edit yesterday's paper.

More than anything, it's a game of innocence. Politicians may come and go, but they always get booed at the ballpark.

One thing is certain: for many of those who came back from WWII, the music of Frank Sinatra was no consolation for their losses. Some had lost friends. Some had lost wives and lovers. All had lost portions of their youth. More important to the Sinatra career the girls started marrying the men who came home. Bobby socks vanished from many closets. The girls who wore them had no need anymore for imaginary lovers; they had husbands. Nothing is more embarrassing to grownups than the passions of adolescence, and for many, Frank Sinatra was the passion.

There is something elegantly sinister about the Rolling Stones. They sit before you at a press conference like five unfolding switchblades; their faces set in rehearsed snarls; their hair studiously unkempt and matted; their clothes part of some private conceit; and the way they walk and talk and the songs they sing all become part of some long mean reach for the jugular.

For those without money, the road to the treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.

In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it is unknowable.

Human beings want to know too much abut each other, and that's why there are so many lies.

Just like that. Gone forever. They will not grow old together. They will never live on a beach by the sea, their hair turned white, dancing in a living room to Billie Holiday or Nat Cole. They will not enter a New York club at midnight and show the poor hip-hop fools how to dance. They will not chuckle together over the endless folly of the world, its vanities and stupid ambitions. They will not hug each other in any chilly New York dawn. Oh, Mary Lou. My baby. My love.

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.

The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else's nostalgia

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.

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.'

What libraries give you is all three tenses - the past tense - the present tense in which we live and the future that we can only imagine. These places have teachers who are living and dead and we are lucky to have them. If I sit here and read Aristotle, he is speaking to me across a thousand years - more than a thousand years. That sense that I am in the company of the great greatest people who ever lived is a humbling experience but a liberating experience.

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.

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.

Writing is the hardest work in the world not involving heavy lifting.

He tried to imagine the sound of the color red.

They all laughed. I drew their pictures and they asked for copies and I handed them out as if they were my tickets to the show. In the Navy Yard, I could drink with men because I worked with men; in the Parkview, I could drink with men because I drew their pictures. The world was a grand confusion. Finally, when I was bleary, when my hand wouldn't do what I wanted it to do, I went home. I would lie alone in the dark, feeling that I was a character in a story that had lost its plot.

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.