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.

When I look at what's happening with #MeToo, my heart breaks, basically, for everybody involved.

I'm the weirdo that tells - asks - the Uber driver to please turn the radio down. I'm so polite about it, though.

When I was in junior high, I went to a really hippy dippy Quaker school where we called our teachers by their first names and stuff.

So we have the story of who we are. I'm a man, and I'm a comedian, and I'm a tall man. I have big teeth and all these things, and I like the first two Batman movies, and I don't drink coffee, or whatever it is.

I used to just want so badly to have afterlife insured and make sure I was going to heaven.

It's hard to control the things that are going to inspire you.

Science would like to tell us that people laugh because of the benign violation theory, but comedy doesn't have hard rules.

I think my mom recognized that I liked people to be happy. I like people to get along. And I like to be a peacemaker. And I liked the church. So she was like, 'You should be a youth pastor.'

The underlying goal of comedy is feeling not-alone.

It's funny - the reason I started doing a podcast was because every time I was on someone else's podcast, I would take it over a little bit.

I think 'everything sucks' is too often leaned upon as a comedic stance. It's a really easy and pretty weak perspective.

Good comedy can be liberating, and if I'm doing my job as a comedian, part of the joy for the audience is getting that release.

In real life, T. J. Miller is one of my best friends, and I'll maybe see him for two or three days in a row, and then I won't see him for four months. That's just how our lives are.

I felt like I was in a unique position, or I am in a unique position, to show the evangelical world in a way that I haven't seen on TV before. That's a world that I'm very familiar with.

I booked an E-Trade commercial. That's a lucrative gig.

The skill set of pastor and comedian are incredibly similar. You want to affect people. You're good at reading rooms. You're persuasive, and you're likable.

Whenever I make a blasphemous joke, I always say that I believe in a God big enough to know that I'm just kidding. How can God not know that I'm kidding? And also, how could God be offended at a thing that he made not believing in him?