When I was in the navy, I wanted to go to Paris and the Academie Julian. I never did. Mexico City took me instead.

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

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.

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.

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

Everybody needs an editor.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Sentimentality is a false sense of self.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Confession alone is not necessarily good for the soul.