Jimmy Breslin

Politics, where fat, bald, disagreeable men, unable to be candidates themselves, teach a president how to act on a public stage.

The first funeral for Andrew Goodman was at night and it was a lot of work. To begin with they had to kill him.

Why something in the public interest such as television news can be fought over, like a chain of hamburger stands, eludes me.

Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.

Complainant received immediate lacerations of the credibility.

The professional arsonist builds vacant lots for money.

When you stop drinking, you have to deal with this marvelous personality that started you drinking in the first place.

Speaks cheerful English and in the past has written this language with a paintbrush that talks.

Designed by architects with honorable intentions but hands of palsy.

Football is a game designed to keep coal miners off the streets.

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.

Media, the plural of mediocrity.

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.

The number one rule of thieves is that nothing is too small to steal.

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.