I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.

If only gravity were working, the path would be symmetrical, it is the wind resistance that produces the tragic curve.

No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.

Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence.

People who live under fascism are not only miserable but they're full of shame. You just don't go in and inject democracy into them. They're half crazy with their own.

Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.

Amateurs... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.