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

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

Life is sad enough without people writing sad books.

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.

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.

If you let conditions stop you from working, they'll always stop you.

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