Top 68 Nelson Algren Quotes
#1. I am against censorship. I don't think there is anything more stupid than censorship.
Nelson Algren
#2. Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose.
Nelson Algren
#3. For way down there, in a shot glass's false bottom, everything was bound to turn out fine after all.
Nelson Algren
#5. If you write something, and you believe in it, you'd like to see sixty million people moved by it.
Nelson Algren
#6. It's the place built out of Man's ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man's endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures. Making it the city of all cities most like Man himself - loneliest creation of all this very old poor earth.
Nelson Algren
#7. Watch for a wild boy of no particular clan, ready for anything, always armed. Prefers fighting to toil, drink to fighting, chasing women to booze or battle: may attempt all three concurrently.
Nelson Algren
#8. 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-coloured walls ...
Nelson Algren
#9. You can't be a good writer in the States anymore because to be a good one you have to have a country where you can be poor and still eat, and still make your living standard secondary to your writing. Thoreau himself couldn't do that in the States today.
Nelson Algren
#10. Since I'm essentially optimistic, I can't imagine a world in which man is totally decimated or degraded.
Nelson Algren
#11. 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.
Nelson Algren
#12. When I burn please bury me deep
Somewhere on West Division Street
Put a bottle beneat' my head
'n a bottle beneat' my feet
Nelson Algren
#13. Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.
Nelson Algren
#14. Well, we all have our good days.
That one bad night can ruin.
Nelson Algren
#15. To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.
Nelson Algren
#16. It is strange how fragile this man-creature is ... in one second he's just garbage. Garbage, that's all.
Nelson Algren
#17. 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.
Nelson Algren
#18. The great trains howling from track to track all night. The taut and telegraphic murmur of ten thousand city wires, drawn most cruelly against a city sky. The rush of city waters, beneath the city streets. The passionate passing of the night's last El.
Nelson Algren
#19. When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don't have enough.
Nelson Algren
#20. Heroin got the drive awright-but there's not a tingle to a ton-you got to get M to get the tingle-tingle.
Nelson Algren
#21. 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.
Nelson Algren
#22. One of the best things Henry Miller ever said was that art goes all out. It's all out. It goes full length ... A big book is an all-out book in which you limit your life to things that pertain directly to the book.
Nelson Algren
#23. I couldn't buy the lice off a sick cat, the cabbie answered from the very depths of self-deprecation.
Nelson Algren
#24. (Chicago is) the only major city in the country where you can easily buy your way out of a murder rap.
Nelson Algren
#25. In this neighborhood, with only forty-five cents, you're a bum. But Sobotnik, even with two dollars, he's still a bum.
Nelson Algren
#26. For the masses who do the city's labor also keep the city's heart.
Nelson Algren
#27. I don't know what kind of great I'm bound to be," Dove considered his prospects calmly, "all I know for certain is I'm born a world-shaker.
Nelson Algren
#28. Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.
Nelson Algren
#29. The devil lives in a double-shot", Roman explains himself obscurely. "I got a great worm inside. Gnaws and gnaws. Every day I drown him and every day he gnaws. Help me drown the worm, fellas.
Nelson Algren
#30. The Irish 'n Polacks always get along- didn't ya ever notice? Irish 'n Polacks live on p'tatoes 'n got it in for Hitler, that's why they get along so good; all over the world. Never heard of no war between Poland 'n Ireland, did you? No sir, that's cause we're all Cath'lics.
Nelson Algren
#31. 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.
Nelson Algren
#32. If you feel you belong to things as they are, you won't hold up anyone in the alley no matter how hungry you may get. And you won't write anything that anyone will read a second time either.
Nelson Algren
#33. 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.
Nelson Algren
#34. 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.
Nelson Algren
#35. 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.
Nelson Algren
#36. Without hesitation, Dove chose the nowhere road. For that was the only place, in his heart of hearts, that he really wanted to go.
Nelson Algren
#37. 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.
Nelson Algren
#38. Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.
Nelson Algren
#39. He said, with sort of a little derisive smile, "How can you walk down the street with all this stuff going on inside you?" I said, "I don't know how you can walk down the street with nothing going on inside you.
Nelson Algren
#40. 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.
Nelson Algren
#41. 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 ...
Nelson Algren
#42. You don't 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.
Nelson Algren
#43. 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.
Nelson Algren
#44. The farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.
Nelson Algren
#45. 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.
Nelson Algren
#46. Never sleep with someone whose troubles are worse than your own.
Nelson Algren
#47. Actually, they fought to fill the emptiness of their lives as they filled their empty glasses. They fought - not because the liquor was in them, but because it did not fill them enough.
Nelson Algren
#48. These will suffice; who knows but we may be on a slope which leads down to
aboriginal savagery. But of this 1 am sure: if we are to escape, we must not yield a foot upon demanding a fair field and an honest race to all ideas.
Nelson Algren
#49. Chicago divided your heart. Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it never can love you.
Nelson Algren
#50. 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.
Nelson Algren
#51. A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting publicly his innermost feelings.
Nelson Algren
#52. The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.
Nelson Algren
#53. 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.
Nelson Algren
#54. I don't recommend being a bachelor, but it helps if you want to write.
Nelson Algren
#55. 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.
Nelson Algren
#56. 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.
Nelson Algren
#57. There is no way of being a creative writer in America without being a loser.
Nelson Algren
#58. And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty.
Nelson Algren
#59. The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.
Nelson Algren
#60. 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.'
Nelson Algren
#61. That's how it's always been: I was always in the clear so long as I was truly guilty. But the minute my motives were honest someone would finger me.
Nelson Algren
#62. Never lie down with a woman who's got more troubles than you.
Nelson Algren
#64. If Jesus Christ treated me like you do, I'd drive in the nails myself.
Nelson Algren
#65. 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.
Nelson Algren
#66. I am the penny whistle of American literature.
Nelson Algren
#67. Well, I may get drunk," the Widow admitted, "but I don't stagger. Sometimes I fall down. But I don't stagger.
Nelson Algren
#68. The city divided by the river is further divided by racial and lingual differences.
Nelson Algren
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
