Quotes from Pete Hamill

One thing that I notice that is changing, you don't see kids on Sunday. Most of them are home. The kids are having much more virtual childhoods instead of childhoods. They don't play ball or hang out with the wrong people or get in fistfights, all the things that once made childhood. I don't know how it's going to turn out.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

He looked at her for a long moment, as if remembering unfinished conversations, and then went back to place some damp, slow-burning turf on the fire.

In 1955, there were 150,000 New Yorkers on welfare; in 1995, there were 1.3 million.

I discovered very early that my instrument wasn't my voice," he said to me once. "It was the microphone.

I had grown up under the heroic spell of the Abstract Expressionist painters

the voice was deeper, richer, with more timbre

Human beings write stories, and read them, for the same good reason: to live

Reaches past her back and holds one of her hands. Silence

Love gets everything all screwed up. It's one of those lies that ruin the world.

How does the brain wire words? Why do the Swiss manage three languages, while most Americans have trouble with one?

I thought I was American, but in those days in Brooklyn, when you were asked what you were, you answered with a nationality other than your own. Since my parents were from Ireland, I was from a group called "Irish.

One thing I learned in this world? Things don't last. People say they do. They don't. Your friends, they die. The wars go on and on and on, then they end. People say they will love each other for the rest of their lives, and they don't.

I never investigate; sometimes the most terrible thing of all is to confirm what you have only imagined.

I urged myself to live in a state of complete consciousness, even when that meant pain or boredom." - Pete Hamill.

Do you still believe in God, Rabbi?", she said at last. His face looked drained and pale. He shook his head from side to side. "I believe in sin," he said and finished his wine. I believe in evil.

In your life, I hope you will never oppress the Weak, that you will oppose Human Bondage in all its guises, that you will bend your Knee to no man.

If you think you'll get tired, then you will get tired. If you think you'll lose, you will lose.

They are worse than fools. They are murderous fools.