The professional arsonist builds vacant lots for money.

Don't trust a brilliant idea unless it survives the hangover.

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.

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

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

The office of president is a bastardized thing, half royalty and half democracy that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit.

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

When you leave New York you ain't going anywhere.

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.

The test of a good idea is its ability to last through a hangover

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.

Love is a better way.

For a country to have a great writer is to have another government.

The law: it has honored us; may we honor it.

The only thing worth doing is what's never been done before.

The first joint priority of the churches of any city should be that of making it hard for people to go to hell from that city.

To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.

Clothes are such a strong part of who a human being is.

It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.

If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.

Those who don't move don't notice their chains.