Pete Hamill Quotes

Quite simply, I love newspapers and the men and women who make them. Newspapers have given me a full, rich life. They have provided me with a ringside seat at some of the most extraordinary events in my time on the planet. They have been my university. They have helped feed, house and educate my children. I want them to go on and on and on. ~ 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. ~ Pete Hamill

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

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

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. ~ Pete Hamill

Frank Sinatra was the voice of the 20th-century American city. ~ Pete Hamill

Those reporters, writers, photographers, and editors are the best Americans I know. They cherish the ideals of their imperfect profession and of the Republic whose freedoms, equally imperfect in practice have so often made those ideals real. They want desperately to do good, honorable work. In spite of long hours and low pay, they are insistently professional. They are also brave.

I can't ever forget that in Indochina 65 journalists were killed in the course of recording the truth about that war. . . .Reporters and photographers did not stop dying when Vietnam was over. They have been killed in Lebanon and Nicaragua, in Bosnia and Peru, and in a lot of other places where hard rain falls.

I can't believe that these good men and women died for nothing. I know they didn't. They died because they were the people chosen by the tribe to carry the torch to the back of the cave and tell the others what is there in the darkness. They died because they were serious about the craft they practiced. They died because they believed in the fundamental social need for what they did with a pen, a notebook, a typewriter, or a camera. They didn't die to increase profits for the stockholders. They didn't die to obtain an invitation to some White House dinner for a social-climbing publisher. They died for us.

As readers or journalists, we honor them when we remember that their dying was not part of a plan to make the world cheaper, baser, or dumber. They died to ~ Pete Hamill

A half-century later, Mark Twain would say that the gold rush drastically changed the American character, ending the tradition of patient apprenticeships, the gradual mastery of self, talent, and money. Gold created the get-rich-quick mentality that has been with us ever since, most recently during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. ~ Pete Hamill

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. ~ Pete Hamill

The Tammany guys, many of them were corrupt. They were still around when I was a boy. You knew the Tammany guys' name. ~ Pete Hamill

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. ~ Pete Hamill

Confession alone is not necessarily good for the soul. ~ Pete Hamill

More than anything, it's a game of innocence. Politicians may come and go, but they always get booed at the ballpark. ~ Pete Hamill

I usually wake up at 7, 7:15, without an alarm. I hate the sound of an alarm. ~ Pete Hamill

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. ~ Pete Hamill

What libraries give you is all three tenses - the past tense - the present tense in which we live and the future that we can only imagine. These places have teachers who are living and dead and we are lucky to have them. If I sit here and read Aristotle, he is speaking to me across a thousand years - more than a thousand years. That sense that I am in the company of the great greatest people who ever lived is a humbling experience but a liberating experience. ~ Pete Hamill

There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep growing until I die. This has exasperated my daughters, amused my friends and baffled my accountant. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago, I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer. ~ Pete Hamill

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

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. ~ Pete Hamill

The best newspapermen I know are those most thrilled by the daily pump of city room excitements; they long fondly for a good murder; they pray that assassinations, wars, catastrophes break on their editions. ~ Pete Hamill

To me, doctors and nurses and teachers are heroes, doing often infinitely more difficult work than the more flamboyant kind of a hero. ~ Pete Hamill

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

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. ~ Pete Hamill

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

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. ~ Pete Hamill

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. ~ Pete Hamill

Today there are a lot of novelists who seem to be writing to be reviewed, not read. ~ Pete Hamill

I know second-generation New Yorkers who have never been to Brooklyn; ~ Pete Hamill

The great novel of twentieth-century New York might be the Daily News. ~ Pete Hamill

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. ~ Pete Hamill

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

New York and Dublin are now suburbs of each other. ~ Pete Hamill

I don't know what that means. To truly live."
"To find work that you love, and work harder than other men. To learn the languages of the earth, and love the sounds of the words and the things they describe. To love food and music and drink. Fully love them. To love weather, and storms, and the smell of rain. To love heat. To love cold. To love sleep and dreams. To love the newness of each day. ~ Pete Hamill

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

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. ~ Pete Hamill

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. ~ Pete Hamill

My ambition was to embrace those general qualities that Ernest Hemingway, a former newspaperman, once said should be present in all good books: 'the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.' ~ Pete Hamill

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. ~ Pete Hamill

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

The goal is to be both disciplined and loose, so that the writing does not turn into a task or a chore. To leave myself behind, along with the mechanics, and disappear into the lives of my characters. ~ Pete Hamill

The spookiest thing I can remember about John Gotti is his eyes. ~ Pete Hamill

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

One thing is certain: for many of those who came back from WWII, the music of Frank Sinatra was no consolation for their losses. Some had lost friends. Some had lost wives and lovers. All had lost portions of their youth. More important to the Sinatra career the girls started marrying the men who came home. Bobby socks vanished from many closets. The girls who wore them had no need anymore for imaginary lovers; they had husbands. Nothing is more embarrassing to grownups than the passions of adolescence, and for many, Frank Sinatra was the passion. ~ Pete Hamill

Just like that. Gone forever. They will not grow old together. They will never live on a beach by the sea, their hair turned white, dancing in a living room to Billie Holiday or Nat Cole. They will not enter a New York club at midnight and show the poor hip-hop fools how to dance. They will not chuckle together over the endless folly of the world, its vanities and stupid ambitions. They will not hug each other in any chilly New York dawn.
Oh, Mary Lou.
My baby.
My love. ~ Pete Hamill

The old women were gone. They seemed to have ascended into the darkness like the waxy smoke from the candles after he capped them with the brass bell at the end of the snuffer. For a moment, staring into the darkness, he imagined the rafters full of smoky old women with hair sprouting from their chins. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Whispering in Italian, and Polish, and Latin about dead husbands and dead children. Like angels grown old but not allowed to die. He could smell them: the odor of candles. ~ Pete Hamill

For a long time, I was in love with her in that diffuse, ambiguous, and obsessive way that can never be explained to strangers. ~ Pete Hamill

Everybody needs an editor. ~ Pete Hamill

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. ~ Pete Hamill

We're in an age when everything's present tense. People don't know how to be still and surrender to the music. ~ Pete Hamill

There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis. ~ 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. ~ Pete Hamill

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

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. ~ Pete Hamill

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. ~ Pete Hamill

You can't edit yesterday's paper. ~ Pete Hamill

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

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

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

They all laughed. I drew their pictures and they asked for copies and I handed them out as if they were my tickets to the show. In the Navy Yard, I could drink with men because I worked with men; in the Parkview, I could drink with men because I drew their pictures. The world was a grand confusion. Finally, when I was bleary, when my hand wouldn't do what I wanted it to do, I went home. I would lie alone in the dark, feeling that I was a character in a story that had lost its plot. ~ Pete Hamill

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

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. ~ Pete Hamill

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. ~ Pete Hamill

Part of my head will always be in the years after World War II - the five years before Korea started. ~ Pete Hamill

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. ~ Pete Hamill

She quotes Robert Louis Stevenson about how young writers must read like predators. And she says that all of us, not just writers, must read like predators. For books are food, she said, for every single one of us. ~ Pete Hamill

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

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. ~ Pete Hamill

Writers are rememberers. ~ Pete Hamill

What would Chaucer have written about if men were perfect? ~ Pete Hamill

In Mexico, I first encountered the attitude that was missing from the optimistic sense of living in the United States: a tragic sense of life. Such a sense doesn't force us into a somber cone of depression and futility; it urges the opposite. The tragic sense opens a human being to the exuberant joys of the present. To laughter, carnal ity, the comical varieties of love, to music and art, to the small human glories of the day. ~ Pete Hamill

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

know Brooklynites who have never been to Radio City Music Hall. ~ Pete Hamill

To love women. To pleasure them, to make them laugh. To be foolish for them. To protect them. To respect them. To listen to them. They are life-givers. To live is to love them. ~ Pete Hamill

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

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. ~ Pete Hamill

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

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

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. ~ Pete Hamill

Maybe words, like potions, were also capable of magic. ~ Pete Hamill

Some newspaper stories can be presented in entertaining ways; they can make you laugh; they can make you weep. But they are not charged with providing exaltation or fantasy. In the most entertained nation in the history of the world, newspapers exist to provide the citizenry with truth. Sometimes the truth can have a moral point. Sometimes the truth is painful. Sometimes the truth is banal. But it has to be true. It must have a granitelike foundation in fact. The mere stacking of facts is not, of course, enough. The facts must be organized into a coherent whole. They must tell a story. And the great story usually tells us something larger than the mere facts, something about what novelists and philosophers have called, perhaps too grandly, the human condition. ~ Pete Hamill

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. ~ Pete Hamill

The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street. ~ Pete Hamill

In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it is unknowable. ~ Pete Hamill

The culture of drink endures because it offers so many rewards: confidence for the shy, clarity for the uncertain, solace to the wounded and lonely, and above all, the elusive promises of friendship and love. ~ Pete Hamill

I wanted to sit there forever, drinking in bitter satisfaction, using someone else as a license. In the years that followed, I did a lot of that. ~ Pete Hamill

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

You've got to have something in your life you don't sell to others. ~ Pete Hamill

The world was a grand confusion. Finally, when I was drunk, and my mind couldn't do what I wanted it to do, I went home. I would lie alone In the dark, feeling that I was a character in a story that had lost its plot."
Sann "Don't ever use the word tragedy again. You tell what happened, and let the reader say it's a tragedy. If you're crying, the reader won't. ~ Pete Hamill

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

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. ~ Pete Hamill

'The Daily News' and 'Post' gave me my life, and I want to see them survive. ~ Pete Hamill

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

The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else's nostalgia ~ Pete Hamill

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. ~ Pete Hamill

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

Mick Jagger's fans bought records with their allowances. Sinatra's people bought them out of wages. ~ Pete Hamill

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

When I was in the navy, I wanted to go to Paris and the Academie Julian. I never did. Mexico City took me instead. ~ Pete Hamill

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. ~ Pete Hamill