Nelson Algren Quotes

For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest imaginative writer that ever brooded in a lavender robe and a mellowed briar in his teeth, couldn't tell you, though e try for a lifetime, how the simplest strap-hanger will ask the conductor to be let off at the next stop. ...It is all for the taking. All the manuals by frustrated fictioneers on how to write can't give you the first syllable of reality, at any cot, that any common conversation can. All the classics, read and re-read, can't help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first-hand.

~ 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

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

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

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

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

~ Nelson Algren

She was neither widow nor mother: she only yearned for the dignity of a woman who had once belonged, somewhere, to somebody. She had belonged to no one, for she had never wanted chick nor child. Her idea of home had been any side-alley entrance and a pint of tinted gin. All she had ever striven for was small change left lying by strangers on North Clark Street bars; and any man's bottle at all.

~ Nelson Algren

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

~ Nelson Algren

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

~ Nelson Algren

I bet you think fellas are the ones to remember a girl -- don't you?He shook his head hurriedly, that he'd always thought that.Fellas have all the fun 'n she just sees one right after another, so it seems like HE'D remember her, better 'n SHE'D remember him, only it works the other way around. I ain't forgot one single fella, all these years. But I bet there ain't TWO 'd know me from a big of bananas this minute.

~ 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

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

But nothing was said about chicken farming anymore. Once, long after it was too late for farming, he might catch her crying and pet her a bit. 'What's the matter, little baby? You got a fever? You want to take the night off?' She might murmur something about candling eggs, but he wouldn't be able to understand what she meant. And after a while she cried on without knowing what she meant either, as a girl cries over a bad dream long after the dream is forgotten.In time the tears dried. She could no longer cry over anything. All the tears had been shed, all the laughs had been had; all the long spent. Leaving nothing to do but to sit stupefied, night after night, under lights made soft beside music with a beat, to rise automatically when someone wearing pants pointed a finger and said 'that one there.

~ Nelson Algren

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

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

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

Along the pavement-colored hall doors stood half open on either side, all the way down; each one was numbered in bright bald tin, each one stood just so much ajar in the gas-lit corridor. Just enough to reveal half-dressed men and women waiting for the rain or about to make love or already through loving and about to get drunk; or already half drunk and beginning to argue about how soon it was going to rain or whose turn it was to run down for whisky or whether it was time to make love again or forget it for once and just wait for rain.

~ Nelson Algren

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

...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

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.

~ 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