Nelson Algren Short Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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