Boredom slays more of existence than war.

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

Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.

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.

Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.

In every death is a celebration; in every ecstasy, one little death.

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