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.
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 alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.
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.
To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.
… Chicago divided your heart. Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it never can love you.
Never sleep with someone whose troubles are worse than your own.
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.
I don’t know what kind of great I’m bound to be,” Dove considered his prospects calmly, “all I know for certain is I’m born a world-shaker.
That’s how it’s always been: I was always in the clear so long as I was truly guilty. But the minute my motives were honest someone would finger me.
He was falling between glacial walls, he didn’t know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-coloured walls…
Without hesitation, Dove chose the nowhere road. For that was the only place, in his heart of hearts, that he really wanted to go.
The farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.
The devil lives in a double-shot”, Roman explains himself obscurely. “I got a great worm inside. Gnaws and gnaws. Every day I drown him and every day he gnaws. Help me drown the worm, fellas.
Well, I may get drunk,” the Widow admitted, “but I don’t stagger. Sometimes I fall down. But I don’t stagger.
Actually, they fought to fill the emptiness of their lives as they filled their empty glasses. They fought—not because the liquor was in them, but because it did not fill them enough.
…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 how you can walk down the street with nothing going on inside you.
Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.
Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.