When I read it ["Tough Guys Don't Dance"], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.

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

I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.

The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore; we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.