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.”
― Pete Hamill

“"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."”
― Pete Hamill, Downtown: My Manhattan

“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.”
― Pete Hamill

“The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else's nostalgia”
― Pete Hamill, Tabloid City

“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.”
― Pete Hamill, Forever

“He tried to imagine the sound of the color red.”
― Pete Hamill, Snow in August

“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.”
― Pete Hamill, Tabloid City

“Human beings want to know too much abut each other, and that's why there are so many lies.”
― Pete Hamill, Forever

“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.”
― Pete Hamill, Snow in August

“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.”
― Pete Hamill, Forever

“I would understand later that baseball was what truly made him an American: the sports pages were more crucial documents than the Constitution.”
― Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life

“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.”
― Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life

“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.”
― Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life

“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.”
― Pete Hamill

“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.”
― Pete Hamill, News Is a Verb: Journalism at the End of the Twentieth Century

“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.”
― Pete Hamill, Forever

“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.”
― Pete Hamill

“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.”
― Pete Hamill, Why Sinatra Matters

“I know second-generation New Yorkers who have never been to Brooklyn;”
― Pete Hamill, Piecework: Writings on Men & Women, Fools and Heroes, Lost Cities, Vanished Calamities and How the Weather Was

“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.”
― Pete Hamill, Forever

“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.”
― Pete Hamill

“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.”
― Pete Hamill, Downtown: My Manhattan

“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.”
― Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life

“I had grown up under the heroic spell of the Abstract Expressionist painters,”
― Pete Hamill, Piecework: Writings on Men & Women, Fools and Heroes, Lost Cities, Vanished Calamities and How the Weather Was

“In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it is unknowable.”
― Pete Hamill, Piecework: Writings on Men & Women, Fools and Heroes, Lost Cities, Vanished Calamities and How the Weather Was

“For a long time, I was in love with her in that diffuse, ambiguous, and obsessive way that can never be explained to strangers.”
― Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life

“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.”
― Pete Hamill, Forever

“I discovered very early that my instrument wasn't my voice," he said to me once. "It was the microphone.”
― Pete Hamill, Why Sinatra Matters

“I never investigate; sometimes the most terrible thing of all is to confirm what you have only imagined.”
― Pete Hamill, Piecework: Writings on Men & Women, Fools and Heroes, Lost Cities, Vanished Calamities and How the Weather Was

“In 1955, there were 150,000 New Yorkers on welfare; in 1995, there were 1.3 million.”
― Pete Hamill, Piecework: Writings on Men & Women, Fools and Heroes, Lost Cities, Vanished Calamities and How the Weather Was