“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.”
“If it’s a beautiful day, I love taking walks. The walks are always aimless.”
“I usually wake up at 7, 7:15, without an alarm. I hate the sound of an alarm.”
“For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.”
“In my experience, growing up in Brooklyn and all that, the real tough guys didn’t act tough. They didn’t talk tough. They were tough, you know? I think about these politicians who try to pose as tough guys – it makes me laugh.”
“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.”
“Confession alone is not necessarily good for the soul.”
“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.”
“The replenishing thing that comes with a nap – you end up with two mornings in a day.”
“It’s easy to be a tough guy when no one’s going to come knocking on your door.”
“Any of us who’ve been newspapermen for a long time hate generalizations.”
“I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine – you mourn things that actually happened.”
“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 heavy with logistical support.”
“The Irish fought the Italians until they started marrying them. And then they both fought the Jews until they started marrying them.”
“Everybody needs an editor.”
“The Internet has got great tools. How we lived without Google all those years I don’t know.”
“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.”
“What would Chaucer have written about if men were perfect?”
“The Mafia exists in the American imagination because we want it to exist.”
“Sinatra slowly found a way to allow tenderness into the performance while remaining manly. 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.”
“You can’t edit yesterday’s paper.”
“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.”
“Say what you will about him Ed Koch is still the best show in town.”
“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.”
“It’s odd being an American now. Most of us are peaceful, but here we are again, in our fifth major war of this century.”
“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.”
“I was the oldest of seven kids, so I had no older brother who would say, ‘Schmuck, don’t do that.’”
“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.”
“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.”
“Boxing is one of those leftovers from a more primitive past that should be finished off and killed. I don’t love it anymore.”
“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.”
“The Tammany guys, many of them were corrupt. They were still around when I was a boy. You knew the Tammany guys’ name.”
“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.”
“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.”
“For me reading a book is what I like doing, curled up in a corner in a comfortable chair.”
“People become writers in the first place by those things that hurt you into art, as Yeats said it. Then they become separated from what started out affecting them. Journalism forces you to look at the world so you don’t get cut off.”
“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.”
“My father did shape me. He didn’t drive because he had one leg, and for years I never drove. I had no mobility.”
“To me, doctors and nurses and teachers are heroes, doing often infinitely more difficult work than the more flamboyant kind of a hero.”
“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.”
“I couldn’t have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.”
“My parents were Belfast Catholics.”
“When I was in the navy, I wanted to go to Paris and the Academie Julian. I never did. Mexico City took me instead.”
“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.’”
“I like to say that journalism is the graduate school from which you never graduate.”
“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.”
“Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language.”
“Getting out any weekly magazine requires many hours of reading, choosing, discarding, and thinking beyond the obvious.”
“Every reporter inhales skepticism. You interview people, and they lie. You face public figures, diligently making notes or taping what is said, and they perform their interviews to fit a calculated script. The truth, alas, is always elusive.”
“The challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news.”
“I’m so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers.”
“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’t ask grandpa to loan you money because you have to go to Afghanistan. I walked the picket line for that to continue.”
“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.”
“There’s no one New York. There’s multiple New Yorks.”
“Anybody who sits and says, ‘I know New York’ is from out of town.”
“Part of my head will always be in the years after World War II – the five years before Korea started.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The most successful terrorist group in the United States for almost 70 years was the Ku Klux Klan. They hated Catholics, Jews, and blacks. They were prone to violence.”
“The spookiest thing I can remember about John Gotti is his eyes.”
“The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street.”
“There’s nothing more human than selling food to strangers, you know?”
“Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it’s you and the ball.”
“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.”
“You can’t be a reporter using Google. It can be a tool. But you have to get out of the house.”
“The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it’s not journalism.”
“Sentimentality is a false sense of self.”
“One thing I learned working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard was to be on time. If the day begins at 8 A.M., be there early, get there, punch the time clock; don’t just stand there like an oaf.”
“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.”
“Travel at least erodes some of the narrowness that exists in each of us.”
“As a master of graphic creation, as teacher, historian, and roving ambassador of comics, Jerry Robinson has ensured that future generations of talented kids will continue to imagine and then put marks on paper.”
“Sinatra’s endurance has become a rallying point for many people who feel that their sacrifices and hard work are no longer honored.”
“Mick Jagger’s fans bought records with their allowances. Sinatra’s people bought them out of wages.”
“Writers are rememberers.”
“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 ’70s, the newspaper guild managed to get people paid what they were worth, but the reporters suddenly became middle class. It’s much more respectable, more uptight, and everyone speaks in guarded tones. And the writing isn’t as good. We always had guys who were failed poets and failed novelists who did it to eat.”
“For years, the defenders of television have argued that the networks are only giving the people what they want. That might be true. But so is the Medellin cartel.”
“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.”
“Leon Uris is a storyteller, in a direct line from those men who sat around fires in the days before history and made the tribe more human.”
“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.”
“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.”
“New York and Dublin are now suburbs of each other.”
“There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis.”
“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.”
“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.’”
“If you ask me, I think 12-step programs are perfectly valid, can be an enormous help. But it depends on the individual.”
“I don’t think enough journalists read enough – literature, history. You’ve got to keep reading all through your career.”
“You’ve got to have something in your life you don’t sell to others.”
“Nothing surprises me, particularly men and their propensity to be fools.”
“Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a newspaperman originally in Colombia. He talked about – and I agree – how everybody has a public life, a private life, and a secret life.”
“’The Daily News’ and ‘Post’ gave me my life, and I want to see them survive.”
“There’s no way that any tabloid can survive if it doesn’t get women to read it.”
“I’m not interested in stories about movie stars. I couldn’t care less what Steve Martin has on his mind.”
“We’re in an age when everything’s present tense. People don’t know how to be still and surrender to the music.”
“All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser’s locker room.”
“Losers are more like the rest of us. They make mistakes they can’t take back.”
“The most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it’s nostalgia.”
“The background of any artist is shaped by the first 15 years of his or her life.”
“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.”
“I think if you had to choose between running a tabloid and being president of the United States, of course you’d run the tabloid, especially in New York.”
“New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church.”
“You will never have enough space in a tabloid paper to compete with the ‘New York Times’ on foreign coverage.”
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