(Chicago is) the only major city in the country where you can easily buy your way out of a murder rap.

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.

A culture of unaccountability is a culture without incentive, and a culture without incentive is the death of critical and creative thinking.

My mother says I'm crazy, I'm not crazy, I just have a different way of looking at things.

I like squirrels. Theyre so adventurous.

Many people out there don't have a choice, in choosing their friends and the people they're being manipulated by.

Look at the whole criminal correction game, which is a big piece of our economy. It's just an invention. Crime is being invented to put people to work.

The summit is not the only place on the mountain.

Some people as a result of adversity are sadder, wiser, kinder, more human. Most of us are better, though, when things go better.

When I was growing up, 'Anna Karenina' was one of my favourite books.

I think you have to have a jazz pedigree to be on jazz radio.

I'm not a party person or someone who likes to sit and drink in clubs all night, and never really have been. I have a good time through work.