Quotes from Pete Hamill


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


Viewers can't work or play while watching television; they can't read; they can't be out on the streets, falling in love with the wrong people, learning how to quarrel and compromise with other human beings. In short, they are asocial.


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


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


Getting out any weekly magazine requires many hours of reading, choosing, discarding, and thinking beyond the obvious.


For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.


For me reading a book is what I like doing, curled up in a corner in a comfortable chair.


Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language.


Everybody needs an editor.


Confession alone is not necessarily good for the soul.


Boxing is one of those leftovers from a more primitive past that should be finished off and killed. I don't love it anymore.


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.


Any of us who've been newspapermen for a long time hate generalizations.


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


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.


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.


The most successful terrorist group in the United States for almost 70 years was the Ku Klux Klan. They hated Catholics, Jews, and blacks. They were prone to violence.


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.


Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it's you and the ball.


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.