Pete Hamill

“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.”

“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.”

“The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it's not journalism.”

“Part of my head will always be in the years after World War II - the five years before Korea started.”

“There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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'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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.'”

“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.”

“Writing is so entwined with my being that I can't imagine a life without it.”

“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.”

“There is a growing feeling that perhaps Texas is really another country, a place where the skies, the disasters, the diamonds, the politicians, the women, the fortunes, the football players and the murders are all bigger than anywhere else.”

“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.”

“For me reading a book is what I like doing, curled up in a corner in a comfortable chair.”

“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.”