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

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

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.

A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting publicly his innermost feelings.

When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don't have enough.

It is strange how fragile this man-creature is.....in one second he's just garbage. Garbage, that's all.

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