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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
A job on a newspaper is a special thing. Every day you take something that you found out about, and you put it down and in a matter of hours it becomes a product. Not just a product like a can or something. It is a personal product that people, a lot of people, take the time to sit down and read.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
All political power is primarily an illusion. Illusion. Mirrors and blue smoke, beautiful blue smoke rolling over the surface of highly polished mirrors, first a thin veil of blue smoke, then a thick cloud that suddenly dissolves into wisps of blue smoke, the mirrors catching it all, bouncing it back and forth.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
Baseball isn't statistics, it's Joe DiMaggio rounding second base.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
Designed by architects with honorable intentions but hands of palsy.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
Don't trust a brilliant idea unless it survives the hangover.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
Don't call me a journalist; I hate the word. It's pretentious!
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
Football is a game designed to keep coal miners off the streets.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
Governments mostly don't do much. And you've also got to understand the level of incompetence out there. Nobody knows what they're doing. They just pose and act as if they know and walk through life and get away with it.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
I became a copy boy. Not for long. I started writing stories.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
I busted out of the place in a hurry and went to a saloon and drank beer and said that for the rest of my life I'd never take a job in a place where you couldn't throw cigarette butts on the floor. I was hooked on this writing for newspapers and magazines.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
If a man, for private profit, tears at the public news, does so with the impatience of one who thinks he actually owns the news you get, it is against the national interest.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
If you gather a lot of stuff, then you write it, write in scenes with dialogue. Somewhere in the middle, rising from all this research like strong metal towers, is your opinions.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
I'm on my high school football team and MUST show how much I know.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
I think it would be very good if writers and artists take a stand in electoral politics. They've got the ability to put words together that might reach the ears of the people of the city who vote.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
Journalism schools are good to get a job, but I don't know what else they are good for. I don't like the word "journalism" to begin with. It's news reporting, and that consists of using your two feet. The only lesson, then, that you could give people is how to climb stairs, because there are no stories on the first floor.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
Journalism should be truthful and entertaining. You know, with news and important facts you can entertain people too. Have a little humor. Life isn't all that deadly all the time, but while you're having fun, tell the truth. If every word of a column is deadly serious, I can't read it. It makes me throw up.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
Media, the plural of mediocrity.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
Men in the uniform of Wall Street retirement: black Chesterfield coat, rimless glasses and the Times folded to the obituary page.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
Newspapers are so boring. How can you read a newspaper that starts with a 51-word lead sentence?
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
People born in Queens, raised to say that each morning they get on the subway and "go to the city," have a resentment of Manhattan, of the swiftness of its life and success of the people who live there.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
Precious was one of a large number of people on the street, many of whom appeared to be women; some, like Precious, actually were.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
Rage is ... This is Breslin's full quote: Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
Speaks cheerful English and in the past has written this language with a paintbrush that talks.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
That's the horrible thing starting out, you get distracted a lot because anything is easier than writing. It's just the same enemy - blank paper.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
The auditorium, named after a dead Queens politician is windowless in honor of the secrecy in which he lived and, probably, the bank vaults he frequented.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
The first funeral for Andrew Goodman was at night and it was a lot of work. To begin with they had to kill him.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
The number one rule of thieves is that nothing is too small to steal.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
The office of president is a bastardized thing, half royalty and half democracy that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
The other feature is a gymnasium named after another dead politician who was gifted with fast and extremely sure hands.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
The test of a good idea is its ability to last through a hangover
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
Those of Manhattan are the brokers on Wall Street and they talk of people who went to the same colleges; those from Queens are margin clerks in the back offices and they speak of friends who live in the same neighborhood.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
True New Yorkers do not really seek information about the outside world. They feel that if anything is not in New York it is not likely to be interesting.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
What you want to do is not go to work. You're not missing a thing. The worst thing I did was start work young.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
When you stop drinking, you have to deal with this marvelous personality that started you drinking in the first place.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
Why something in the public interest such as television news can be fought over, like a chain of hamburger stands, eludes me.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is the team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn't maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
As nearly all great fortunes in America are made on land stolen while the public's back is turned — and by people who want money but don't want to work for it, by men who use the title of builder and yet never have driven a nail into a board — nowhere was the relationship between politician and merchant closer than at the time the subways of New York were built.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
So the Mets are a bad ball club. All right, they're the worst ball club you ever saw. So what? The important thing is they are in the National League and they are familiar.
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
The Mets lose an awful lot? Listen, mister. Think a little bit. When was the last time you won anything out of life?
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By AnonymJimmy Breslin
You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn't maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a t-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?
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