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

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

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language.

You can't edit yesterday's paper.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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