One thing I learned in this world? Things don’t last. People say they do. They don’t. Your friends, they die. The wars go on and on and on, then they end. People say they will love each other for the rest of their lives, and they don’t.
I don’t ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.
That was it. To be a rolling stone. In the romantic places of the earth. Ready for a fight, a frolic, or a feed. And since I was Irish, since I was Billy Hamill’s son, since I was from Brooklyn: a drink too.
The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else’s nostalgia
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.
All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser’s locker room.
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.
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.
There is a growing feeling that perhaps Texas is really another country, a place where the skies, the disasters, the diamonds, the politicians, the women, the fortunes, the football players and the murders are all bigger than anywhere else.
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.
Travel at least erodes some of the narrowness that exists in each of us.
The Mafia exists in the American imagination because we want it to exist.
For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.
The most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it’s nostalgia.