Quotes from Pete Hamill

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.

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.

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.

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

Say what you will about him Ed Koch is still the best show in town.

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.

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

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.

You can't edit yesterday's paper.

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

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.

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.

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.'

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

There's no one New York. There's multiple New Yorks.

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