The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

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.

Coolness ebbs and flows.Whoever is cool today may not be cool today

Overcoming my dad telling me that I could never amount to anything is what has made me the megalomaniac that you see today.

That is the spirit of the music: to not leave anyone out, to be inclusive.

A great error is more easily propagated than a great truth, because it is easier to believe, than to reason, and because people prefer the marvels of romances to the simplicity of history.

Increasingly, the state system has been eroding. Terrorists have exploited this weakness by burrowing into the state system in order to attack it.

The reflexive allergy to L.A. that a lot of New Yorkers have, I feel like it's kind of nonsense.

I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.

I was still making movies so it wasn't as if I were working in a bar, but they were independent films that couldn't find distributors.

I think we need to embrace feminism, we need to embrace all of the gifts women bring to the workplace.

The authors of great evils know best how to remove them.