The Tammany guys, many of them were corrupt. They were still around when I was a boy. You knew the Tammany guys' name.
When I was a kid, I could draw, and my ambition was to be a cartoonist. I wanted to draw comics. But I also liked newspaper comics.
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.
Vietnam should have taught us that mindless anti-Communism is not a cause worth killing or dying for in a world in which Communism is hardly a monolithic force.
Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language.
I'm not interested in stories about movie stars. I couldn't care less what Steve Martin has on his mind.
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.
Anybody who sits and says, 'I know New York' is from out of town.
Getting out any weekly magazine requires many hours of reading, choosing, discarding, and thinking beyond the obvious.
If you ask me, I think 12-step programs are perfectly valid, can be an enormous help. But it depends on the individual.
Losers are more like the rest of us. They make mistakes they can't take back.
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.
Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it's you and the ball.
The challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news.
Writing is so entwined with my being that I can't imagine a life without it.
Too many people take New York for granted. The primary reason is that history is not taught. That's outrageous in a city where the past is still visible.
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.
When I was in the navy, I wanted to go to Paris and the Academie Julian. I never did. Mexico City took me instead.
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.
One thing that I notice that is changing, you don't see kids on Sunday. Most of them are home. The kids are having much more virtual childhoods instead of childhoods. They don't play ball or hang out with the wrong people or get in fistfights, all the things that once made childhood. I don't know how it's going to turn out.
