I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence - providing they have the facts, providing they have the information.

Work is born in us. We take to it kindly or unkindly. The terms may be easy or harsh, but the contract is binding.

Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.

Reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.

The issue is jobs. You can't get away from it: jobs. Having a buck or two in your pocket and feeling like somebody.

Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt.

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel