Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it's you and the ball.

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 usually wake up at 7, 7:15, without an alarm. I hate the sound of an alarm.

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.

For years, the defenders of television have argued that the networks are only giving the people what they want. That might be true. But so is the Medellin cartel.

There's no way that any tabloid can survive if it doesn't get women to read it.

Travel at least erodes some of the narrowness that exists in each of us.

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.

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.

As a reporter, going around, you hear stories you can't prove, which means you can't put them in the newspaper. But they're good stories, and I would jot them down thinking maybe one day I could write that as a short story.

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.

You can't edit yesterday's paper.

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 think if you had to choose between running a tabloid and being president of the United States, of course you'd run the tabloid, especially in New York.

It's easy to be a tough guy when no one's going to come knocking on your door.

Viewers can't work or play while watching television; they can't read; they can't be out on the streets, falling in love with the wrong people, learning how to quarrel and compromise with other human beings. In short, they are asocial.

The Anarchists set off World War I with a gunshot in Sarajevo - but they faded away. It wasn't that the police drove them out of business. The ideology had nowhere to go except into permanent negativity.

I'm so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers.

An independent Brooklyn probably would have built a new stadium for the Dodgers, so today there might be not just baseball but also the only football team on this side of the Hudson.

To me, doctors and nurses and teachers are heroes, doing often infinitely more difficult work than the more flamboyant kind of a hero.

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.

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.

At the beginning of writing fiction, too much of the newspaper style was getting into the prose, so I thought, 'Gee, I should try writing longhand. Maybe I can tap something that goes back to the point before I could type.'

In the 1950s, when I was hanging around Sullivan's Gym and the Gramercy Gym, there were fixed fights. Mob guys like Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo had taken over the sport; one lightweight champion loaned his title to others at least twice; the welterweight division was a slag heap.

Sinatra's endurance has become a rallying point for many people who feel that their sacrifices and hard work are no longer honored.

My father did shape me. He didn't drive because he had one leg, and for years I never drove. I had no mobility.

Confession alone is not necessarily good for the soul.

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 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.

You've got to have something in your life you don't sell to others.

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.

The Irish fought the Italians until they started marrying them. And then they both fought the Jews until they started marrying them.

Sentimentality is a false sense of self.

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.