Top 55 Pete Hamill Quotes

I like to say that journalism is the graduate school from which you never graduate.

My father did shape me. He didn’t drive because he had one leg, and for years I never drove. I had no mobility.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it’s nostalgia.

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

I’m so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers.

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.

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.

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

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.’

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.

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

Anybody who sits and says, ‘I know New York’ is from out of town.

The spookiest thing I can remember about John Gotti is his eyes.

The Tammany guys, many of them were corrupt. They were still around when I was a boy. You knew the Tammany guys’ name.

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.

The replenishing thing that comes with a nap – you end up with two mornings in a day.

Writers are rememberers.

Sentimentality is a false sense of self.

It’s easy to be a tough guy when no one’s going to come knocking on your door.

When I was in the navy, I wanted to go to Paris and the Academie Julian. I never did. Mexico City took me instead.

If it’s a beautiful day, I love taking walks. The walks are always aimless.

The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street.

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.

I was the oldest of seven kids, so I had no older brother who would say, ‘Schmuck, don’t do that.’

Writing is so entwined with my being that I can’t imagine a life without it.

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

To me, doctors and nurses and teachers are heroes, doing often infinitely more difficult work than the more flamboyant kind of a hero.

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.

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.

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

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.

I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine – you mourn things that actually happened.

New York and Dublin are now suburbs of each other.

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.

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.

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.

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