American - Journalist | June 24, 1935 -
Boxing is one of those leftovers from a more primitive past that should be finished off and killed. I don't love it anymore.
Pete Hamill
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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.
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The Tammany guys, many of them were corrupt. They were still around when I was a boy. You knew the Tammany guys' name.
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Bootleggers were romanticized by people like F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example. Gatsby is a bootlegger. And they were not thought of as evil criminals in the newspapers, either. There was a certain amount of affection for them.
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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.
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For me reading a book is what I like doing, curled up in a corner in a comfortable chair.
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People become writers in the first place by those things that hurt you into art, as Yeats said it. Then they become separated from what started out affecting them. Journalism forces you to look at the world so you don't get cut off.
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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.
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My father did shape me. He didn't drive because he had one leg, and for years I never drove. I had no mobility.
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I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened.
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I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.
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My parents were Belfast Catholics.
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