Nelson Algren Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

Nelson Algren
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.

Nelson Algren
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
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
On Chicago:
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
If Jesus Christ treated me like you do, I'd drive in the nails myself.

Nelson Algren
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
Chicago divided your heart. Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it never can love you.

Nelson Algren
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
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
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
Life is hard by the yard, son. But you don't have to do it by the yard. By the inch it's a cinch. And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty.

Nelson Algren
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
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
Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never play cards with a man named Doc. And never lay down with a woman who's got more troubles than you.

Nelson Algren
For the masses who do the city's labor also keep the city's heart.

Nelson Algren
I'm not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don't think you get a true picture of people without it in writing... It's a kind of poetry, it's an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don't think anything is true that doesn't have it, that doesn't have poetry in it.

Nelson Algren
[Algren] shunts aside all rules, regulations, and dicta, except for three laws that he says a nice little old Negro lady once taught him: Never play cards with any man named "Doc." Never eat at any place called "Mom's." And never, ever, no matter what else you do in your life, never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own.

Nelson Algren
... 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'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
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
The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.

Nelson Algren
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
He had met him before, that certain down-at-heel vet growing stooped from carrying a thirty-five-pound monkey on his back.

Nelson Algren
A humorless soldierly people whose arts are courage, honor, and bloodletting.

Nelson Algren