Nelson Algren Quotes

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.

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

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.

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

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.

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.

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.

Never lie down with a woman who's got more troubles than you.

(Chicago is) the only major city in the country where you can easily buy your way out of a murder rap.

Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose.

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

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.

There's people in hell who want ice water.

It is strange how fragile this man-creature is.....in one second he's just garbage. Garbage, that's all.

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.

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

I don't recommend being a bachelor, but it helps if you want to write.

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.

Never eat in a place called 'Mom's'.

And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty.

I am the penny whistle of American literature.

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.

Well, I may get drunk, " the Widow admitted, "but I don't stagger. Sometimes I fall down. But I don't stagger.

The farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.

Without hesitation, Dove chose the nowhere road. For that was the only place, in his heart of hearts, that he really wanted to go.

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.

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.