“The most popular explanation hinged on the impatience of one John Gotti, a violent little fat man from Howard Beach”

“The macho man should be able to climb into a ring with a hangover and a bad stomach and win the title: he should be able to drink and whore all night and still work a typewrit­er the next day: and more than anything else, he must always be capable of an erection”

“I was so goddamned defensive because people had always considered me a rather muscular mono-minded greasy-teeshirt slimy-type neighborhood guinea.”

“The truth of a time and place is, of course, always illusive; but no historian can tell the story of Miami in the last decade without acknowledging one gigantic fact of municipal life: cocaine.”

“I do this for a living,” he said once. “This is my life, not my hobby!” That attitude was at the heart of the system that later destroyed him and will almost certainly survive him.

Will Eisner's work at its best contained a kind of urban poetry, a lyric strain similar to such di­verse Brooklynites as Irwin Shaw, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer

“There will be a Mexico when this is finished. But if they only clean up the physical mess, then we are doomed.”

“In Fosseville the gaudiest dreams existed side by side with the most vicious betrayals; everything was real but nothing was true”

“On December 22, 1984, at about 1:30 in the afternoon, Bernie Goetz boarded a southbound number 2 Seventh Avenue IRT train at 14th Street and his life changed forever. So did the lives of Darrell Cabey, Troy Canty, James Ramseur, and Barry Allen.”

“We didn't know until later that the Van Nuys cops had received a call from some terrified citizen saying that his brother was going to shoot Kennedy”