In New Haven, Conn., when I was growing up, there were two sorts of Irish. There were the "drugstore cowboy" micks, who hung around the Elm Street poolroom over Longley's Lunch. And there were the earnest young Irishmen who fought their way up from the Grand Avenue saloonkeeper backgrounds of their fathers, went through Yale Law School, and have now found high place by the preferment of local politics or in the teaching profession.

America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true.

There's one good kind of writer - a dead one.

Neither man nor God is going to tell me what to write.

Studs Lonigan, on the verge of fifteen, and wearing his first suit of long trousers, stood in the bathroom with a Sweet Caporal pasted on his mug.

Life was hard on mothers; but then, they just didn't understand.

The danger of censorship in cultural media increases in proportion to the degree to which one approaches the winning of a mass audience.