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.

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.

We assume that celebrities have it easy and so love to watch them having to endure a bit of hardship.

I love Nautilus and stretching. The results are immediate, and that gives me the motivation to continue.

I am a ordinary teenager. I fall in love like everyone else.

I don't call you handsome, sir, though I love you most dearly: far too dearly to flatter you. Don't flatter me.

The essential elements of giving are power and love - activity and affection - and the consciousness of the race testifies that in the high and appropriate exercise of these is a blessedness greater than any other.

My mother keeps things in perspective for me. She makes me realize that the acting I do and love is no more important than what one of my brothers does-he works in a shoe repair shop. If my career ever tapers off, I'll go to college.

Actors love mental disorders, dialects, and corsets. Give them one of the three and they're happy.

My goal is, of course, for this show to do well, and I would love it if people liked it.

I love living on that stage. Without that, I'd die.

I love my DSL, but I love my WiFi more. And I probably get on the Internet 40 percent to 50 percent more because of the combination of those technologies.

But I love New York. I used to set my alarm clock when I was there, and get up at 4am and get a coffee, just because I could.

I love children and I love men, but I can't commit to either for the rest of my life.

Sitting at home the way I do, I'd just love the hear from people. It'd be a great help in passing the time.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

We can recognize the dawn and the decline of love by the uneasiness we feel when alone together.

Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery.

People react to fear, not love; they don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true.

I sort of understood that when I first started: that you shouldn't repeat a success. Very often you're going to, and maybe the first time you do, it works. And you love it. But then you're trapped.

There is love there. And then there's times when I can't even stomach Simon. You don't have to sit next to him. That's all I have to say.

When I see children, I see the face of God. That's why I love them so much. That's what I see.

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

I love pasta with the homemade marinara sauce I had as a kid.

They who love dancing too much seem to have more brains in their feet than in their head.

I think I had a more European outlook about the body and sex. The body is in no way dirty, and sex is something beautiful to give to and share with a lover. It has nothing to do with promiscuity, because I only believe in being in love with one man at a time.