The novelist ... must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all.

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

There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.

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

Over the years, I've found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write.

Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.

It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.