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 poetry, it's an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don't think anything is true that doesn't have it, that doesn't have poetry in it.
The farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.
To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.
Life is hard by the yard, son. But you don't have to do it by the yard. By the inch it's a cinch. And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty.
A writer who knows what he is doing isn't doing very much.
Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.
Never sleep with someone whose troubles are worse than your own.
I've always felt strongly that a writer shouldn't be engaged with other writers, or with people who make books, or even with people who read them. I think the farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.
The less he sees of other writers the more of a writer he will ultimately become. When he sees scarcely anyone except other writers, he is ready for New York.
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-colored walls of [an addict]'s terrible pit.
The clock in the room above the Safari told only Junkie Time.
Well, here you get to be a writer when there's absolutely nothing else you can do.
Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder.
I haven't consciously tried to develop [a style]. The only thing I've consciously tried to do was put myself in a position to hear the people I wanted to hear talk talk.
I always think of writing as a physical thing.
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 American Century except from behind the billboards.
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 certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.
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.
… Chicago divided your heart. Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it never can love you.
