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.”

“Boxing is one of those leftovers from a more primitive past that should be finished off and killed. I don't love it anymore.”

“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 he...”

“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 t...”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 love...”

“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.”

“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...”

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

“The most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it's nostalgia.”

“New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church.”

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

“Nothing surprises me, particularly men and their propensity to be fools.”

“For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.”

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

“I was the oldest of seven kids, so I had no older brother who would say, 'Schmuck, don't do that.'”

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