A Few Words From Pete Hamill

"You can go into a bookstore for Sarah Palin's book and say, 'Here's a book by Melville' that you haven't read yet. And you'll buy both of them.

"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." --Pete Hamill, from "Pete Hamill Talks About Newspapers, Fiction, and Life with Keyboard and Pen" by Mark Bialczak, The Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY), December 6, 2009.

I recently went to Borders to buy Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns which is about the Great Migration of Southern blacks to the North and West. I didn't buy another book but I did browse the shelves. What a joyful experience that was!

On Crime

"For someone never trained for useful work, crime is a skill like any other. It has its craft, its lore, its traditions, rewards and risks. Poverty helps train people for such jobs, the way poverty goads so many other people to acquire legitimate skills."--Pete Hamill, "For Looters, $ Overcame Good Sense," New York Post, August 17, 1977. Re: the Blackout of 1977.