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

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

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

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.

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

My parents were Belfast Catholics.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Writers are rememberers.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.