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.
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.
Anybody who sits and says, 'I know New York' is from out of town.
The challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news.
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.
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.
I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career.
Sinatra's endurance has become a rallying point for many people who feel that their sacrifices and hard work are no longer honored.
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.
You can't edit yesterday's paper.
It's easy to be a tough guy when no one's going to come knocking on your door.
Writers are rememberers.
There's nothing more human than selling food to strangers, you know?
Say what you will about him Ed Koch is still the best show in town.
I was the oldest of seven kids, so I had no older brother who would say, 'Schmuck, don't do that.'
The Tammany guys, many of them were corrupt. They were still around when I was a boy. You knew the Tammany guys' name.
The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street.
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.
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 blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it's not journalism.
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.
When I was in the navy, I wanted to go to Paris and the Academie Julian. I never did. Mexico City took me instead.
I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.
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.
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 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.'
'The Daily News' and 'Post' gave me my life, and I want to see them survive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sentimentality is a false sense of self.
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.
There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis.
To me, doctors and nurses and teachers are heroes, doing often infinitely more difficult work than the more flamboyant kind of a hero.
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 nationalism, with its engines of independence and self-determination, is a more powerful force by far than Marxism and must be understood and respected.
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.
Nothing surprises me, particularly men and their propensity to be fools.
Confession alone is not necessarily good for the soul.
Travel at least erodes some of the narrowness that exists in each of us.
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.
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.
New York and Dublin are now suburbs of each other.
Losers are more like the rest of us. They make mistakes they can't take back.
You will never have enough space in a tabloid paper to compete with the 'New York Times' on foreign coverage.
Any of us who've been newspapermen for a long time hate generalizations.
