Time lost can never be recovered...and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.

Whenever I finish a book, I start with a blank slate and never have ideas lined up.

His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.

No one cared what St. Louis thought, although the city got a wink for pluck.

Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue eyes.

. . . why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow.

Place has always been important to me, and one thing today's Chicago exudes, as it did in 1893, is a sense of place. I fell in love with the city, the people I encountered, and above all the lake and its moods, which shift so readily from season to season, day to day, even hour to hour.