Zitat des Tages von Pete Hamill:
The Mafia exists in the American imagination because we want it to exist.
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.
The Tammany guys, many of them were corrupt. They were still around when I was a boy. You knew the Tammany guys' name.
You will never have enough space in a tabloid paper to compete with the 'New York Times' on foreign coverage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I usually wake up at 7, 7:15, without an alarm. I hate the sound of an alarm.
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.
There's no one New York. There's multiple New Yorks.
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.
New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church.
The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it's not journalism.
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.
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.
I'm so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers.
I like to say that journalism is the graduate school from which you never graduate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
Say what you will about him Ed Koch is still the best show in town.
If it's a beautiful day, I love taking walks. The walks are always aimless.
Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it's you and the ball.
All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser's locker room.
The replenishing thing that comes with a nap - you end up with two mornings in a day.
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.
Getting out any weekly magazine requires many hours of reading, choosing, discarding, and thinking beyond the obvious.
You can't be a reporter using Google. It can be a tool. But you have to get out of the house.
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.
Anybody who sits and says, 'I know New York' is from out of town.
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.
The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street.
I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened.
