Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards.

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.

No sheep may leave the flock, " he said to anyone who would listen, "unless he comes back again.

Although there are things that just tend to rub you the wrong way too! Smile and move on your choice!

Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference

Mean comedy is not really something that I personally gravitate towards or something that I do.

Art is a guarantee of sanity.

I think the best approach is not to be too much like the thing that they are referring to, see it as a guide.

I was a typical farm boy. I liked the farm. I enjoyed the things that you do on a farm, go down to the drainage ditch and fish, and look at the crawfish and pick a little cotton.

I remember a passage in Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield," which he was afterwards fool enough to expunge: "I do not love a man who is zealous for nothing.

I can't memorize names and shake hands at the same time.

I always stayed fit because I'm a performer, and all of those things help me to perform.