... Chicago divided your heart. Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it never can love you.

For the masses who do the city's labor also keep the city's heart.

The devil lives in a double-shot", Roman explains himself obscurely. "I got a great worm inside. Gnaws and gnaws. Every day I drown him and every day he gnaws. Help me drown the worm, fellas.

Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.

(Chicago is) the only major city in the country where you can easily buy your way out of a murder rap.

He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-coloured walls.

And never, ever, no matter what else you do in your whole life, never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own.