152 Quotes by Pete Hamill

The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else’s nostalgia.

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

More than anything, it’s a game of innocence. Politicians may come and go, but they always get booed at the ballpark.

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.

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.

In 1955, there were 150,000 New Yorkers on welfare; in 1995, there were 1.3 million.

Maybe words, like potions, were also capable of magic.

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.

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.