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
If it's a beautiful day, I love taking walks. The walks are always aimless.
The most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it's nostalgia.
The replenishing thing that comes with a nap - you end up with two mornings in a day.
I was the oldest of seven kids, so I had no older brother who would say, 'Schmuck, don't do that.'
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.
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.
For me reading a book is what I like doing, curled up in a corner in a comfortable chair.
You can't be a reporter using Google. It can be a tool. But you have to get out of the house.
For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.
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.'
All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser's locker room.
I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened.
What would Chaucer have written about if men were perfect?
The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it's not journalism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it's you and the ball.
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.
I usually wake up at 7, 7:15, without an alarm. I hate the sound of an alarm.
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.
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.
There's no way that any tabloid can survive if it doesn't get women to read it.
Travel at least erodes some of the narrowness that exists in each of us.
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.
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.
You can't edit yesterday's paper.
Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language.
There's no one New York. There's multiple New Yorks.
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.
In my experience, growing up in Brooklyn and all that, the real tough guys didn't act tough. They didn't talk tough. They were tough, you know? I think about these politicians who try to pose as tough guys - it makes me laugh.
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 challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news.
I'm so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers.
If you ask me, I think 12-step programs are perfectly valid, can be an enormous help. But it depends on the individual.
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.
To me, doctors and nurses and teachers are heroes, doing often infinitely more difficult work than the more flamboyant kind of a hero.
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.
Anybody who sits and says, 'I know New York' is from out of town.
Boxing is one of those leftovers from a more primitive past that should be finished off and killed. I don't love it anymore.
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 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.
Sinatra's endurance has become a rallying point for many people who feel that their sacrifices and hard work are no longer honored.
My father did shape me. He didn't drive because he had one leg, and for years I never drove. I had no mobility.
Confession alone is not necessarily good for the soul.
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 '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've got to have something in your life you don't sell to others.
