It is strange how fragile this man-creature is.....in one second he's just garbage. Garbage, that's all..

Thinking of Poe, thinking of Mark Twain and Vachel Lindsay, thinking of Jack London and Tom Wolfe, one begins to feel there is almost no way of becom….

You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alie….

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man..

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….

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 ….

And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty..

...he said, with sort of a little derisive smile, "How can you walk down the street with all this stuff going on inside you?" I said, "I don't know h….

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….

I don't recommend being a bachelor, but it helps if you want to write..

And never, ever, no matter what else you do in your whole life, never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own..

The Impossible Generalized Man today is the critic who believes in loving those unworthy of love as well as those worthy -yet believes this only inso….

The great trains howling from track to track all night. The taut and telegraphic murmur of ten thousand city wires, drawn most cruelly against a city….

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 loveli….

I'm not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don't think you get a true picture of people without it in writing... It's a kind of p….

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

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 Ame….

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

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..

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