The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.

When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don't have enough.

Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.

Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.

A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting publicly his innermost feelings.

Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.

... Chicago divided your heart. Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it never can love you.

For the masses who do the city's labor also keep the city's heart.

Watch for a wild boy of no particular clan, ready for anything, always armed. Prefers fighting to toil, drink to fighting, chasing women to booze or battle: may attempt all three concurrently.

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.

The prize is as big as the fight in you to get it.

Random thought fills the streambed, cascading with care and spilling over the flood plain until bifurcation forces it to arc and fork into a single, determined stream.

But Shelley had a hyperthyroid face.

A man who has been in another world does not come back unchanged. One can't put the difference into words. When the man is a friend it may become painful: the old footing is not easy to recover.

Only one thing can make a soul complete and that thing is love.

We all have our flaws. But we overcome them. And sometimes, it's our flaws that make us who we are.

I'm very lazy, I hate to work.

Among other evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised.

It is difficult to argue with the belly, for it has no ears.

Isn't there a curious elegance in how one moment passes into another?