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

“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 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

“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: A Novel

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

“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

“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: A Novel

“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: A Memoir

“The old women were gone. They seemed to have ascended into the darkness like the waxy smoke from the candles after he capped them with the brass bell at the end of the snuffer. For a moment, staring into the darkness, he imagined the rafters full of smoky old women with hair sprouting from their chins. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Whispering in Italian, and Polish, and Latin about dead husbands and dead children. Like angels grown old but not allowed to die. He could smell them: the odor of candles.”
― Pete Hamill, Snow in August

“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: A Novel

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

“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

“He hears someone say, without irony, “Only the strong survive.” And turns his gaze on the Rubens drawing. A muscled man with a warrior’s shield, an imagining of a scene Rubens surely never saw. Cormac thinks: The truth is that the strong don’t always survive. Usually the weak survive and the cowardly and the mediocre. They gather their forces to destroy the strong, because the strong are at the core of their fear. They burned strong Africans at the stake and reduced others to tortured rubble. Cormac used to think of them as the League of Frightened White Men. Some of them are here at this table. Frightened of change. Frightened of the new. Frightened of losing secret powers, privileges, and control. Imagining apocalypse.”
― Pete Hamill, Forever: A Novel

“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: A Novel