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

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 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.

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

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.

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 loves no one, worthy or no. This is what makes him impossible.

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.

I am against censorship. I don't think there is anything more stupid than censorship.

I do have the feeling that other writers can't help you with writing. I've gone to writers' conferences and writers' sessions and writers' clinics, and the more I see of them, the more I'm sure it's the wrong direction. It isn't the place where you learn to write.

I don't think I've ever been either militant or profound as an anti-Fascist. When the issue has come up, when certain things have come up, and I've been called on to express - literally, when I've been cornered, then I take a left-wing stand.

I don't think the isolation of the American writer is a tradition; it's more that, geographically, he just is isolated, unless he happens to live in New York City. But I don't suppose there's a small town around the country that doesn't have a writer.

I'd put the ninety-nine billion dollars - whatever it is - that's being appropriated for the Air Force and the Navy, and I'd put it into schools. I'd put it into traveling scholarships.

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. I mean, a writer doesn't really live; he observes.

I've always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens - you know, until it finds its own plot - because you can't outline and then fit the thing into it. I suppose it's a slow way of working.

If you write something, and you believe in it, you'd like to see sixty million people moved by it.

It isn't till now, in the American Century, as we have recklessly dubbed it, that tribal pressures toward conformity have been brought to bear so ruthlessly upon men and women seeking to work creatively.

New York is the place where they bind books and write blurbs and arrange the publicity and print the galleys... But Chicago is the place where the book is lived out before it is bound and the song is sung before it is recorded.

Obsession remains the price of creation, and the writer who declines that risk will come up with nothing more creative than 'The Foxes of Harrow' or 'Mrs. Parkington.'

Since I'm essentially optimistic, I can't imagine a world in which man is totally decimated or degraded.

The American middle class's faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essence, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources.

The reason nobody investigates the men who are trading off our freedoms for private enrichment is that they are the very ones who are doing the investigating.

The struggle to write with profundity of emotion and at the same time to live like a millionaire so exhausted F. Scott Fitzgerald that he was at last brought down to the point where he could no longer be both a good writer and a decent person.

You dont 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 city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to forge out of steel and blood red neon its own peculiar wilderness.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

To do the Ozzfest again would be great. I'd like to finish with a final Sabbath album. You always feel that it is still a challenge.

People are not perfect... very often the relationships that are strongest are those where people have worked through big crises, but they've had to work through them. So the challenge to us is to work through that.

Every single book is a challenge.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

The lopsided attitudes of college professors pose a serious challenge to learning because students are so susceptible to becoming lopsided sheep.

I really enjoy comedy. It's a real challenge.

I had a hard time with that hockey. I hadn't grown up skating, so that was my biggest challenge. We worked on it and worked on it. But then when we first shot it, it was so hard for me.

The challenge is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.

Change can either challenge or threaten us. Your beliefs pave your way to success or block you.

My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.

I'd say that it's important for music to be there that gives you a challenge, that rearranges things in your head.

I like good stories. Quality products and character are what's important. Even if the script isn't that strong, if I challenge myself with a great character, I'll go for it.

I tend to arrive in the rehearsal process with very strongly developed ideas about what I want to do. But I don't like those ideas to be things that are not subject to change, or subject to development, or subject to challenge.

I'm not looking to set a standard... but, I believe I have offered a challenge to others with my work.

If you live a life of make-believe, your life isn't worth anything until you do something that does challenge your reality. And to me, sailing the open ocean is a real challenge, because it's life or death.

And, I'd never done Tennessee Williams, and I had done Broadway musicals, so it was a challenge.

When you remove the risk, you remove the challenge. When you remove the challenge, you wither on the vine.

After Land I wanted to continue exploring the theme but I needed a new challenge so turned to colour. I explored Bradford and produced a series of urban landscapes that I liked, but because Land had made such an impact on the general public my colour work wasn't reviewed.

The worlds I paint leave a lot to engage the imagination by hinting at what lies beyond the four edges of the painting. I think getting beyond the four edges of an opportunity or challenge is one of the basic skills you need in business.

For me, it's a bigger challenge, it's much harder to do and much more rewarding to do well, then just to think up stuff of your own, hit or miss, because you've got to see to it that you don't torpedo any of his punch lines.

This same habitual blindness to spiritual, substantive dimensions of every significant challenge continues to handicap Hollywood.

Every artist has to grow, and has to challenge themselves with a new form of expression.

The next challenge for Christianity is to remind Europeans that we are called to seek the truth.