Nelson Algren famous quotes

Never sleep with someone whose troubles are worse than your own.
-- Nelson Algren

#Sex #Women #Sleep

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.
-- Nelson Algren

#Spring #Cities #October

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

#Book #Character #Feelings

There is no way of being a creative writer in America without being a loser.
-- Nelson Algren

#America #Creative #Way

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

#Writing #Blow #Creative

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

#Men

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

#Mom #Sleep #Men

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

#Book #Guilty #Innocent

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

#Love You #Heart #Knowing

There's people in hell who want ice water.
-- Nelson Algren

#Ice #Water #People

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

#Writing #Want #Helping

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

#Night #Sky #Cities

...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

#Stuff #Littles #Said

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

#Example #Poverty

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

#Heart #Cities #Mass

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

#Challenges #Humanity #Literature

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

#Fighting #Boys #Battle

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

#Lying #Advice #Trouble

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

#Wall #Fall #Dark

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

#Cutting #Car #House

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

#Alcohol #Devil #Helping

Never eat in a place called 'Mom's'.
-- Nelson Algren

#Mom #Culinary

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

#Mean #Writing #Emotional

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

#Self #Vision #Deception

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

#Monday #Fog #Tuesday

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

#Writing

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

#Men #Garbage #Strange

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

#Love #Believe #Men

Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose.
-- Nelson Algren

#Cities #Broken #Noses

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

#Country #Rap #Cities

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

#Responsibility #Writing #Men

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

#Real #Broken #Lovely