There's people in hell who want ice water.

Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose.

I'm not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don't think you get a true picture of people without it in writing... It's a kind of poetry, it's an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don't think anything is true that doesn't have it, that doesn't have poetry in it.

...he said, with sort of a little derisive smile, "How can you walk down the street with all this stuff going on inside you?" I said, "I don't know how you can walk down the street with nothing going on inside you.

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.

I don't recommend being a bachelor, but it helps if you want to write.