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...

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.

Without hesitation, Dove chose the nowhere road. For that was the only place, in his heart of hearts, that he really wanted to go.

You can’t be a good writer in the States anymore because to be a good one you have to have a country where you can be poor and still eat, and still make your living...

…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...

I am the penny whistle of American literature.

I bet you think fellas are the ones to remember a girl — don’t you?”He shook his head hurriedly, that he’d always thought that.”Fellas have all the fun ‘n she just sees one right after...

For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest imaginative writer that ever brooded in a lavender robe and a mellowed briar in his...

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.

The farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.

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...

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.

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.

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.

I went out there for a thousand a week, and I worked Monday, and I got fired Wednesday. The guy that hired me was out of town Tuesday.

Never sleep with someone whose troubles are worse than your own.

Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose.

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

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.

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

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 insofar as no personal risk is entailed. Meaning he...

But nothing was said about chicken farming anymore. Once, long after it was too late for farming, he might catch her crying and pet her a bit. ‘What’s the matter, little baby? You got a...

Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.

It’s the place built out of Man’s ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man’s endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures. Making it the city of all cities...