“When I think of New York City, I think of all the girls, the Jewish girls, the Italian girls, the Irish, Polack, Chinese, German, Negro, Spanish, Russian girls, all on parade in the city. I don't k...”

“I'm older now, I'm a man getting near middle age, putting on a little fat and I still love to walk along Fifth Avenue at three o'clock on the east side of the street between Fiftieth and Fifty-seve...”

“I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?”

“I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.”

“Now,' Elias said, 'if only I didn't have to go home to my lousy wife. I married her in 1929. A lot of things've changed since 1929.' He sighed. 'What's a woman?' he asked. 'A Woman is a trap.”

“I look at everything. God gave me eyes and I look at women and men and subway excavations and moving pictures and the little flowers of the field. I casually inspect the universe.”

“...the values ascribed to the Indian will depend on what the white writer feels about Nature, and America has always had mixed feelings about that. At one end of the spectrum is Thoreau, wishing to...”

“Literature is news which stays news.”

“If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, When youre ready.”

“This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests me”

“In some neighborhoods, faces mature faster than bodies.”

“My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you cant go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people w...”