152 Quotes by Pete Hamill

One great example of the way Tweed really helped the Irish was when the water started to overflow from the Croton Reservoir, it went to certain parts of Manhattan but not to where the poor lived. The mythology of the dirty Irish developed because they had no water, not until Tweed, through aggravation or bribery, got the water to flow through poor neighborhoods.

This is truly marvelous work: full of mystery, nostalgia, joy, The Color of Whimsy.

It's a good demonstration of will for any terrorist outfit to consider. If they knocked out every subway line and all the bus terminals, New Yorkers would leave the house, moaning, and find their way to work. That's our tribe.

If you're going to write about things that are as old as mankind, you've got to find a new, fresh way to write about them, to make people interested. Winchell found a way.

He became out of step with the basic audience, because they didn't believe it. And I think that was the beginning of the end of Winchell. I think it was a self-inflicted wound.

What libraries give you is all three tenses - the past tense - the present tense in which we live and the future that we can only imagine. These places have teachers who are living and dead and we are lucky to have them. If I sit here and read Aristotle, he is speaking to me across a thousand years - more than a thousand years. That sense that I am in the company of the great greatest people who ever lived is a humbling experience but a liberating experience.

Human beings want to know too much abut each other, and that's why there are so many lies.

This is truly marvelous work full of mystery, nostalgia, joy, The Color of Whimsy.

He tried to imagine the sound of the color red.