Opinionated and outspoken to the last.

In his last regular column, published in Newsday on Tuesday, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Jimmy Breslin said he was so sure Democratic nominee John Kerry was going to win the presidential race easily that he wasn't even going to stay up to watch the election returns on television.

"So I go to bed with total confidence. . . . And I leave today as the only one in America who from the start was sure John Kerry would win by a large margin," Breslin wrote.

Most of the column was about why Breslin thought Kerry would win. Only at the end did he write, "Thanks for the use of the hall."

Breslin, a New York fixture, has been writing about the city for four decades. He had been producing three columns a week for Newsday, and the paper said he would still be contributing from time to time.

Breslin, author of a number of books, told the Associated Press Tuesday he would still be writing.

"I'll be around, don't worry," he said. "And doing everything at once."