Pete Hamill Quotes

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.

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 only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else's nostalgia

He tried to imagine the sound of the color red.

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

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.

"The wanderer in Manhattan must go forth with a certain innocence, because New York is best seen with innocent eyes. It doesn't matter if you are younger or old. Reading our rich history makes the experience more layered, but it is not a substitute for walking the streets themselves. For old-timer or newcomer, it is essential to absorb the city as it is now in order to shape your own nostalgias. That's why I always urge the newcomer to surrender to the city's magic. Forget the irritations and the occasional rudeness; they bother New Yorkers too. Instead, go down to the North River and the benches that run along the west side of Battery Park City. Watch the tides or the blocks of ice in winter; they have existed since the time when the island was empty of man. Gaze at the boats. Look across the water at the Statue of Liberty or Ellis Island, the place to which so many of the New York tribe came in order to truly live. Learn the tale of our tribe, because it's your tribe too, no matter where you were born. Listen to its music and its legends. Gaze at its ruins and monuments. Walk its sidewalks and run fingers upon the stone and bricks and steel of our right-angled streets. Breathe the air of the river breeze."

I would understand later that baseball was what truly made him an American: the sports pages were more crucial documents than the Constitution.

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.

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.

Besides, skin color was skin color, right? It was just the color of your goddamned skin. There was nothing anybody could do about that. You were born with it. Like some people were born with big feet or blue eyes. You didn't make the choice. Your parents did. Or God did.

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.

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.

The boy admonished himself for wanting everything to be a story. And now realized that some journeys were not stories. On some journeys, nothing really happened. You just kept taking steps.

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.

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

Maybe words, like potions, were also capable of magic.

I had grown up under the heroic spell of the Abstract Expressionist painters,

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

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

I discovered very early that my instrument wasn't my voice," he said to me once. "It was the microphone.

Do you still believe in God, Rabbi?", she said at last. His face looked drained and pale. He shook his head from side to side. "I believe in sin," he said and finished his wine. I believe in evil.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Human beings write stories, and read them, for the same good reason: to live

You lived in the present, but that present always contained a past, some image of a ruined paradise.

Love gets everything all screwed up. It's one of those lies that ruin the world.

I will live my life from now on, I will not perform it.

In your life, I hope you will never oppress the Weak, that you will oppose Human Bondage in all its guises, that you will bend your Knee to no man.

the voice was deeper, richer, with more timbre,

and one of their lessons was that the essence of the work was the doing of it.

I never investigate; sometimes the most terrible thing of all is to confirm what you have only imagined.

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

How strange it seems, with so much gone Of life and love, to still live on.

How does the brain wire words? Why do the Swiss manage three languages, while most Americans have trouble with one?

Normalcy was the byword, even when it was a lie.

They are worse than fools. They are murderous fools.

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

Quakers quaking. Congregationalists congregating, Baptists baptizing, Dutch Reformers reforming; Episcopalians pissing on the lot. All asked for money to support the war against evil.

The cause of death was always life. Across many years now, he had comforted people he knew would soon die. He hoped his consoling whispers would do them no harm. He hoped too that he could reduce their immediate pain. But he could not carry them around in his head like luggage. He had to examine with all the intensity he could muster, do what he could, avoid harm, and then forget them.

My father had a job in the factory across the way, and because he'd lost his leg, he had a stump... and in the summer... he'd work on this assembly line 8 hours a day and he was home at night. And I heard him weeping in the dark around 1 o'clock in the morning and I knew that no matter what I ever did ... that I had to honor that pain. I think that's what the children of immigrants do, all of us. We know what they gave up. They gave up their countries. In some cases they gave up their languages. They worked at the lousiest, rottenest jobs in order to put food on our table. We have to honor that, for the rest of our lives.

I thought I was American, but in those days in Brooklyn, when you were asked what you were, you answered with a nationality other than your own. Since my parents were from Ireland, I was from a group called “Irish.

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.

If love lyrics were too mushy, he could sing them and make wised-up fun of the mush, and still, in some part of the self, acknowledge that there was some truth to the words. He could be tender and still be a tough guy. Ruth Etting could sing her weepy torch songs, but for men, whining or self-pity was not allowed; they were forbidden by the male codes of the city. Sinatra slowly found a way to allow tenderness into the performance while remaining manly. When he finally took command of his own career, 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. That is one reason why he continues to matter; Frank Sinatra created a new model for American masculinity.

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.

There he is, three days after his fifth birthday, standing barefoot upon wet summer grass. He is staring at the house where he lives: the great good Irish place of whitewashed walls, long and low, with a dark slate roof glistening in the morning drizzle. Standing there, he knows it will turn pale blue when the sun appears to work its magic.

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.

It wasn’t that I was a fan of Stalin; I didn’t like his eyes, which were beady and shifty in the news photographs; and his hands looked too small for his body. More important, I knew that there were no freedoms in the Soviet Union (or Russia, as we all called it), and I was sure that if I lived there I’d have to be against the government, and that meant I’d end up in Siberia. But I thought there was something amazingly stupid about the Cold War; Stalin was now the devil incarnate, only four years after he had served on the side of the angels, namely us. Either we’d made a mistake during the war, or we were making a mistake now. And there was a larger problem, of which Stalin was part: Why were so many Americans so scared, all the time? We were the strongest country in the world. We won the war. We had the atom bomb. In May, Truman finally broke the Russian blockade of Berlin with a giant airlift. So why were these people shitting in their pants when they thought about communists? The communists won in China, but that didn’t mean they were about to land in Los Angeles. And why did so many people think that the communists might be behind anything that made sense: unions, health care, free education? Even in 1949, there were people saying that we shouldn’t have stopped in Berlin in 1945, we should’ve kept going all the way to Moscow. George Patton, he knew how to deal wit’ dese bastids. Oney thing they respect is force.

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 bring us the truth.

I urged myself to live in a state of complete consciousness, even when that meant pain or boredom." - Pete Hamill.

Until that night, the well-fed, respectable whites had convinced themselves that slaves loved being slaves.

Everywhere, men and women changed their names and embraced strange gods in order to live.

JACKIE ONASSIS HAD a dinner party to welcome Jane and me to New York. Guests included William Styron and his wife, Rose—they were Martha’s Vineyard regulars with Jackie; Pete Hamill, the Daily News columnist; and Annabel and Mike Nichols.

see the world as a skeptic, not a cynic, while allowing for the wan possibility of human decency.

In a city where human beings struggle for the privilege of sleeping over subway grates,

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

Aye, they are noble. Noble bastards, they are. How did it begin? And how will it end? I’ll tell you how. The story’s in the history books, if you know how to read them’ [...] ‘Together, they stole from weaker people and then used the money to create armed theater. That’s what is was, lad. That’s what it is! Armed theater! Castles and music and fine robes and crowns and jewels-- it’s all theater. Acting! Performing! And all of it made possible by the use of swords nad muskets and cannon, and driven by jealousy and theft! [...] They bow down to the Great Actor, the King Himself, [...] The kings sneer at them for being fools, and with all that stolen money, they build armies and fleets and export their skills at robbery to the entire world! That’s how it all began, lad. A few cynical actors who fooled entire nations!’ ‘And how will it end?’ ‘If there’s a God in Heaven,’ he said, ‘it will end at the gallows.’ He sighed. ‘Any civilized man must be against homicide,’ he said ‘But negicide seems a most admirable crime

I don’t know what that means. To truly live.’ [...] ‘To find work that you love and work harder than other men. To learn 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.’ He stared at his hands. ‘To love women. To pleasure them. To make them laugh. To be foolish for them. To respect them. To listen to them’ He paused. ‘They are the lifegivers. To live is to love them’ ‘You will see,’ he said. ‘The proof will be in your living

If you think you'll get tired, then you will get tired. If you think you'll lose, you will lose.

Reaches past her back and holds one of her hands. Silence