You will never have enough space in a tabloid paper to compete with the 'New York Times' on foreign coverage.
— Pete Hamill
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.
The background of any artist is shaped by the first 15 years of his or her life.
All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser's locker room.
We're in an age when everything's present tense. People don't know how to be still and surrender to the music.
'The Daily News' and 'Post' gave me my life, and I want to see them survive.
Nothing surprises me, particularly men and their propensity to be fools.
If you ask me, I think 12-step programs are perfectly valid, can be an enormous help. But it depends on the individual.
There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis.
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.
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.
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.
Sinatra's endurance has become a rallying point for many people who feel that their sacrifices and hard work are no longer honored.
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.
The Internet has got great tools. How we lived without Google all those years I don't know.
Everybody needs an editor.
There's nothing more human than selling food to strangers, you know?
You can't edit yesterday's paper.
For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.
The most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it's nostalgia.
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.
I'm not interested in stories about movie stars. I couldn't care less what Steve Martin has on his mind.
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.
You've got to have something in your life you don't sell to others.
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.'
New York and Dublin are now suburbs of each other.
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.
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.
Writers are rememberers.
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.
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.
The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it's not journalism.
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.
The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street.
New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church.
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.
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.
There's no way that any tabloid can survive if it doesn't get women to read it.
What would Chaucer have written about if men were perfect?
I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mick Jagger's fans bought records with their allowances. Sinatra's people bought them out of wages.
Travel at least erodes some of the narrowness that exists in each of us.
Sentimentality is a false sense of self.
You can't be a reporter using Google. It can be a tool. But you have to get out of the house.
Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it's you and the ball.
