Pete Hamill Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Pete Hamill.
Famous Quotes By Pete Hamill
I was the oldest of seven kids, so I had no older brother who would say, 'Schmuck, don't do that.' — Pete Hamill
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. — Pete Hamill
For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library. — 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
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
More than anything, it's a game of innocence. Politicians may come and go, but they always get booed at the ballpark. — 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
The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it's not journalism. — Pete Hamill
You can't be a reporter using Google. It can be a tool. But you have to get out of the house. — Pete Hamill
Boxing is one of those leftovers from a more primitive past that should be finished off and killed. I don't love it anymore. — 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 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
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
All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser's locker room. — 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
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've got to have something in your life you don't sell to others. — Pete Hamill
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. — 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
I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was. — 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
It's easy to be a tough guy when no one's going to come knocking on your door. — Pete Hamill
The Internet has got great tools. How we lived without Google all those years I don't know. — Pete Hamill
Anybody who sits and says, 'I know New York' is from out of town. — Pete Hamill
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. — Pete Hamill
Writers are rememberers. — Pete Hamill
There is something elegantly sinister about the Rolling Stones. They sit before you at a press conference like five unfolding switchblades; their faces set in rehearsed snarls; their hair studiously unkempt and matted; their clothes part of some private conceit; and the way they walk and talk and the songs they sing all become part of some long mean reach for the jugular. — Pete Hamill
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. — Pete Hamill
There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis. — Pete Hamill
In 1955, there were 150,000 New Yorkers on welfare; in 1995, there were 1.3 million. — 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
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
That was it. To be a rolling stone. In the romantic places of the earth. Ready for a fight, a frolic, or a feed. And since I was Irish, since I was Billy Hamill's son, since I was from Brooklyn: a drink too. — 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
Sentimentality is a false sense of self. — Pete Hamill
I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened. — Pete Hamill
Mick Jagger's fans bought records with their allowances. Sinatra's people bought them out of wages. — Pete Hamill
He tried to imagine the sound of the color red. — Pete Hamill
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. — 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
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
Frank Sinatra was the voice of the 20th-century American city. — 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
Cormac heard that glorious word for the first time in the1850s, and it came to epitomize for him all of New York's rough skepticism. It had much greater weight than the word 'horseshit.' Horseshit was flaky and without substance; it dried in the sun and was blown away in a high wind. Preachers were the master of horseshit. But bullshit was heavier, filled with crude truth, a kind of black cement. The voters knew the difference and they appreciated bullshit when practiced by a master. Any politician who used God in a speech was practicing horseshit. When he talked about building schools, getting water into Chatham Square, or lighting the darkest streets, Bill Tweed was practicing bullshit. If a third of the bullshit actually came into existence, their lives were made better. Tweed, as he moved up in the system, was a master of bullshit. — Pete Hamill
The spookiest thing I can remember about John Gotti is his eyes. — 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
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.' — 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
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
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
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. — 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
Say what you will about him Ed Koch is still the best show in town. — Pete Hamill
I'm so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers. — 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
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
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
I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career. — Pete Hamill
New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church. — Pete Hamill
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. — 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
Human beings want to know too much abut each other, and that's why there are so many lies. — 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
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. — 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
Losers are more like the rest of us. They make mistakes they can't take back. — Pete Hamill
The replenishing thing that comes with a nap - you end up with two mornings in a day. — Pete Hamill
New York and Dublin are now suburbs of each other. — Pete Hamill
What would Chaucer have written about if men were perfect? — Pete Hamill
The challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news. — Pete Hamill
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. — Pete Hamill
There's nothing more human than selling food to strangers, you know? — Pete Hamill
I know second-generation New Yorkers who have never been to Brooklyn; — 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
I'm not interested in stories about movie stars. I couldn't care less what Steve Martin has on his mind. — 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
You can't edit yesterday's paper. — 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 most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it's nostalgia. — Pete Hamill
The painting was food. He wanted to caress it, hold it in his hands, lick its glazed surface, plunge into it, dive into the Florentine light. Years vanished, decades were erased, and he was again the boy who had come here to the feast of art. — Pete Hamill
I like to say that journalism is the graduate school from which you never graduate. — 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
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
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.' — 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
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
Travel at least erodes some of the narrowness that exists in each of us. — Pete Hamill
know Brooklynites who have never been to Radio City Music Hall. — Pete Hamill
Today there are a lot of novelists who seem to be writing to be reviewed, not read. — Pete Hamill
The Irish fought the Italians until they started marrying them. And then they both fought the Jews until they started marrying them. — Pete Hamill
In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it is unknowable. — Pete Hamill