Quotes from Pete Hamill

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.

Confession alone is not necessarily good for the soul.

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.

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.

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

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.

The challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news.

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

I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.

The Irish fought the Italians until they started marrying them. And then they both fought the Jews until they started marrying them.

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

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

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.

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

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

The odyssey is not going out and seeing the world: it's about trying to get home. It's home to the woman you love.

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

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

This is truly marvelous work full of mystery, nostalgia, joy, The Color of Whimsy.

New York and Dublin are now suburbs of each other.

Vietnam should have taught us that nationalism, with its engines of independence and self-determination, is a more powerful force by far than Marxism and must be understood and respected.

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.

Everybody needs an editor.

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