A biography for Pete Hamillhasn’t been written yet.
“Sentimentality is a false sense of self.”
“To me, doctors and nurses and teachers are heroes, doing often infinitely more difficult work than the more flamboyant kind of a hero.”
“He steps on stage and draws the sword of rhetoric, and when he is through, someone is lying wounded and thousands of others are either angry or consoled.”
“You will never have enough space in a tabloid paper to compete with the 'New York Times' on foreign coverage.”
“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.”
“If you ask me, I think 12-step programs are perfectly valid, can be an enormous help. But it depends on the individual.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.”
“It's easy to be a tough guy when no one's going to come knocking on your door.”
“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.”
“The most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it's nostalgia.”
“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.”
“Nothing surprises me, particularly men and their propensity to be fools.”
“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.”
“There's no way that any tabloid can survive if it doesn't get women to read it.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.'”