Quotes from Robert Warshow

No convention of the gangster film is more strongly established than this: it is dangerous to be alone. And yet the very conditions of success make it impossible not to be alone…. The successful man is an outlaw.

The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking....History may kill you, it is true, but you have taken the right attitude, you will have been intelligent and humane and suitably melancholy to the end.

In its initial character, the gangster film is simply one example of the movies' constant tendency to create fixed dramatic patterns that can be repeated indefinitely with a reasonable expectation of profit.

The gangster is the man of the city, with the city's language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring, carrying his life in his hands like a placard, like a club.

Joe is never sure whether they're mad or just alarmingly and uncompromisingly incapable of self-delusion.