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Pete Hamill [1935-0] American

Rank: 101
Journalist

Pete Hamill is an American journalist, novelist, essayist, editor and educator. Widely traveled and having written on a broad range of topics, he is perhaps best known for his career as a New York City journalist, as "the author of columns that sought to capture the particular flavors of New York City's politics and sports and the particular pathos of its crime."

Anger, Friendship, Independence, Morning, Teacher

Quote	Tags	Rank
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.	Morning	101
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.		102
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.		103
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.		104
Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it's you and the ball.		105
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.		106
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.		107
Say what you will about him Ed Koch is still the best show in town.		108
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.		109
I was the oldest of seven kids, so I had no older brother who would say, 'Schmuck, don't do that.'		110
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.		111
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.		112
Boxing is one of those leftovers from a more primitive past that should be finished off and killed. I don't love it anymore.		113
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.		114
The Tammany guys, many of them were corrupt. They were still around when I was a boy. You knew the Tammany guys' name.		115
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.		116
My father lost his leg in 1927 playing soccer. A kick broke his leg; gangrene set in. They sawed it off. So he didn't get what a lot of Irish immigrants got, which was a job on the Waterfront - he didn't get that.		117
For me reading a book is what I like doing, curled up in a corner in a comfortable chair.		118
Confession alone is not necessarily good for the soul.		119
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.		120
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.		121
My father did shape me. He didn't drive because he had one leg, and for years I never drove. I had no mobility.		122
To me, doctors and nurses and teachers are heroes, doing often infinitely more difficult work than the more flamboyant kind of a hero.		123
I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened.		124
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.		125
I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.		126
My parents were Belfast Catholics.		201
When I was in the navy, I wanted to go to Paris and the Academie Julian. I never did. Mexico City took me instead.		202
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.'	Friendship	203
I like to say that journalism is the graduate school from which you never graduate.		204
Writing is so entwined with my being that I can't imagine a life without it.		205
Usually, I work every day, seven days a week. When I go three days without writing, my body aches with anxiety; my mood is irritable. My night dreams grow wild with unconscious invention.		206
Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language.		207
Getting out any weekly magazine requires many hours of reading, choosing, discarding, and thinking beyond the obvious.		208
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.		209
The challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news.		210
I'm so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers.		211
The Huffingtonpost.com does not pay its writers. Tina Brown's thedailybeast.com does pay its writers. You have to be paid because this is not a hobby. You have to keep that standard. You can't ask grandpa to loan you money because you have to go to Afghanistan. I walked the picket line for that to continue.		212
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.		213
Vietnam should have taught us that mindless anti-Communism is not a cause worth killing or dying for in a world in which Communism is hardly a monolithic force.		214
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.	Independence	215
There's no one New York. There's multiple New Yorks.		216
Anybody who sits and says, 'I know New York' is from out of town.		217
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.		218
Part of my head will always be in the years after World War II - the five years before Korea started.		219
The Irish fought the Italians until they started marrying them. And then they both fought the Jews until they started marrying them.		220
There are a lot of very good New York novels, but there's no single all-encompassing novel, the way you could look at any number of Dickens books and say we know London as a result of that.		221
I usually wake up at 7, 7:15, without an alarm. I hate the sound of an alarm.		222
If it's a beautiful day, I love taking walks. The walks are always aimless.		223
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.		224
The replenishing thing that comes with a nap - you end up with two mornings in a day.		225
It's easy to be a tough guy when no one's going to come knocking on your door.		226
Any of us who've been newspapermen for a long time hate generalizations.		301
The Anarchists set off World War I with a gunshot in Sarajevo - but they faded away. It wasn't that the police drove them out of business. The ideology had nowhere to go except into permanent negativity.		302
The spookiest thing I can remember about John Gotti is his eyes.		303
The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street.		304
There's nothing more human than selling food to strangers, you know?		305
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.		306
Everybody needs an editor.		307
You can't be a reporter using Google. It can be a tool. But you have to get out of the house.		308
The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it's not journalism.		309
The Internet has got great tools. How we lived without Google all those years I don't know.		310
Sentimentality is a false sense of self.		311
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.		312
In the newspaper business, I was in the last generation before the arrival of the personnel manager. You were hired by editors - and editors who would take a chance on what they perceived to be talent and not hire a resume.		313
Travel at least erodes some of the narrowness that exists in each of us.		314
As a master of graphic creation, as teacher, historian, and roving ambassador of comics, Jerry Robinson has ensured that future generations of talented kids will continue to imagine and then put marks on paper.	Teacher	315
Sinatra's endurance has become a rallying point for many people who feel that their sacrifices and hard work are no longer honored.		316
Mick Jagger's fans bought records with their allowances. Sinatra's people bought them out of wages.		317
Writers are rememberers.		318
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.		319
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.		320
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.		321
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.		322
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.		323
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.		324
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.		325
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.		326
New York and Dublin are now suburbs of each other.		401
There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis.		402
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.		403
At the beginning of writing fiction, too much of the newspaper style was getting into the prose, so I thought, 'Gee, I should try writing longhand. Maybe I can tap something that goes back to the point before I could type.'		404
If you ask me, I think 12-step programs are perfectly valid, can be an enormous help. But it depends on the individual.		405
I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career.		406
You've got to have something in your life you don't sell to others.		407
Nothing surprises me, particularly men and their propensity to be fools.		408
What would Chaucer have written about if men were perfect?		409
'The Daily News' and 'Post' gave me my life, and I want to see them survive.		410
There's no way that any tabloid can survive if it doesn't get women to read it.		411
I'm not interested in stories about movie stars. I couldn't care less what Steve Martin has on his mind.		412
We're in an age when everything's present tense. People don't know how to be still and surrender to the music.		413
The Mafia exists in the American imagination because we want it to exist.		414
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.		415
All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser's locker room.		416
Losers are more like the rest of us. They make mistakes they can't take back.		417
The most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it's nostalgia.	Anger	418
The background of any artist is shaped by the first 15 years of his or her life.		419
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.		420
For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.		421
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.		422
New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church.		423
You can't edit yesterday's paper.		424
You will never have enough space in a tabloid paper to compete with the 'New York Times' on foreign coverage.		425

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