The spookiest thing I can remember about John Gotti is his eyes.
— Pete Hamill
Any of us who've been newspapermen for a long time hate generalizations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.
To me, doctors and nurses and teachers are heroes, doing often infinitely more difficult work than the more flamboyant kind of a hero.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's easy to be a tough guy when no one's going to come knocking on your door.
If it's a beautiful day, I love taking walks. The walks are always aimless.
The Irish fought the Italians until they started marrying them. And then they both fought the Jews until they started marrying them.
Anybody who sits and says, 'I know New York' is from out of town.
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.
I'm so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers.
Getting out any weekly magazine requires many hours of reading, choosing, discarding, and thinking beyond the obvious.
Writing is so entwined with my being that I can't imagine a life without it.
When I was in the navy, I wanted to go to Paris and the Academie Julian. I never did. Mexico City took me instead.
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.
My father did shape me. He didn't drive because he had one leg, and for years I never drove. I had no mobility.
Confession alone is not necessarily good for the soul.
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.
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 was the oldest of seven kids, so I had no older brother who would say, 'Schmuck, don't do that.'
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.
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.
The replenishing thing that comes with a nap - you end up with two mornings in a day.
I usually wake up at 7, 7:15, without an alarm. I hate the sound of an alarm.
Part of my head will always be in the years after World War II - the five years before Korea started.
There's no one New York. There's multiple New Yorks.
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.
The challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news.
Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language.
I like to say that journalism is the graduate school from which you never graduate.
My parents were Belfast Catholics.
I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened.
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.
For me reading a book is what I like doing, curled up in a corner in a comfortable chair.
The Tammany guys, many of them were corrupt. They were still around when I was a boy. You knew the Tammany guys' name.
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.
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.
