Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.

Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.

For many years Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle.

When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance.

Like the actor, authority has faith in its false whiskers. But its deepest faith is in the human illusion. People will hang on to illusion as eagerly as life itself.

I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops. I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me.

The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.