There's no one New York. There's multiple New Yorks.

The challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news.

If you ask me, I think 12-step programs are perfectly valid, can be an enormous help. But it depends on the individual.

Anybody who sits and says, 'I know New York' is from out of town.

Boxing is one of those leftovers from a more primitive past that should be finished off and killed. I don't love it anymore.

In the newspaper business, I was in the last generation before the arrival of the personnel manager. You were hired by editors - and editors who would take a chance on what they perceived to be talent and not hire a resume.

I'm not interested in stories about movie stars. I couldn't care less what Steve Martin has on his mind.

The Huffingtonpost.com does not pay its writers. Tina Brown's thedailybeast.com does pay its writers. You have to be paid because this is not a hobby. You have to keep that standard. You can't ask grandpa to loan you money because you have to go to Afghanistan. I walked the picket line for that to continue.

Usually, I work every day, seven days a week. When I go three days without writing, my body aches with anxiety; my mood is irritable. My night dreams grow wild with unconscious invention.

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.

Any of us who've been newspapermen for a long time hate generalizations.

Everybody needs an editor.

The Mafia exists in the American imagination because we want it to exist.

Across the years, in spite of everything I knew, my passion endured. Newspapers and magazines paid me to cover fights when I'd have paid my own way.

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.

Getting out any weekly magazine requires many hours of reading, choosing, discarding, and thinking beyond the obvious.

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.

Nothing surprises me, particularly men and their propensity to be fools.

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.

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.

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.

Writers are rememberers.

Writing is so entwined with my being that I can't imagine a life without it.

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.

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.

You will never have enough space in a tabloid paper to compete with the 'New York Times' on foreign coverage.

The Tammany guys, many of them were corrupt. They were still around when I was a boy. You knew the Tammany guys' name.

Losers are more like the rest of us. They make mistakes they can't take back.

I like to say that journalism is the graduate school from which you never graduate.

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.

Mick Jagger's fans bought records with their allowances. Sinatra's people bought them out of wages.

Say what you will about him Ed Koch is still the best show in town.

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.

I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.

My parents were Belfast Catholics.

Part of my head will always be in the years after World War II - the five years before Korea started.

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.

The spookiest thing I can remember about John Gotti is his eyes.

The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street.

There's nothing more human than selling food to strangers, you know?

Amazon.com isn't the same as going down an aisle. The same as record stores. You'll go for Billie Holiday, and you buy Gustav Mahler as you're going out the door.

The Internet has got great tools. How we lived without Google all those years I don't know.

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.

New York and Dublin are now suburbs of each other.

There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis.

I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career.

'The Daily News' and 'Post' gave me my life, and I want to see them survive.

We're in an age when everything's present tense. People don't know how to be still and surrender to the music.

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.