I suppose it’s too bad people can’t be a little more consistent. But if they were, maybe they would stop being people.

Isn’t everyone a part of everyone else?

I coulda’ had class. I coulda’ been a contender! But instead I got a one way ticket to Palookaville.

First, no qualms. Not the thinnest sliver of misgiving about the value of his work. He was able to feel that the most important job in the world was putting over Monsoon. In the second...

I’d like to be remembered as someone who used their ability as a novelist or as a dramatist to say the things he felt needed to be said about the society while being as entertaining...

Never talk to waiters like that,” Kit said.”Can I help it,” he said, “if I only went one year to finishing school?””It isn’t manners,” she said like a sensible schoolteacher quietly disciplining a small boy,...

There was a lull. Sammy was staring across the room at George Opdyke, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. I was about to say he was lost in thought, but Sammy was never really lost, and...

I thought of Sammy Glick rocking in his cradle of hate, malnutrition, prejudice, suspicions, amorality, the anarchy of the poor; I thought of him as a mangy puppy in a dog-eat-dog world. I was modulating...

Very much on the defensive, I admitted that I liked to read.”Sure,” Sammy said, “I never said I had anything against reading books…””The publishers will be relieved to know that,” I tried to insert, but...

The principal furniture in Billie’s mind was a good-sized bed.