Nelson Algren
Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Mom
Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.Collection: Legal
Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose.
I'd put the ninety-nine billion dollars - whatever it is - that's being appropriated for the Air Force and the Navy, and I'd put it into schools. I'd put it into traveling scholarships.
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.
The American middle class's faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essence, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources.
Obsession remains the price of creation, and the writer who declines that risk will come up with nothing more creative than 'The Foxes of Harrow' or 'Mrs. Parkington.'
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.
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.
It isn't till now, in the American Century, as we have recklessly dubbed it, that tribal pressures toward conformity have been brought to bear so ruthlessly upon men and women seeking to work creatively.
The reason nobody investigates the men who are trading off our freedoms for private enrichment is that they are the very ones who are doing the investigating.
The struggle to write with profundity of emotion and at the same time to live like a millionaire so exhausted F. Scott Fitzgerald that he was at last brought down to the point where he could no longer be both a good writer and a decent person.
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.
I've always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens - you know, until it finds its own plot - because you can't outline and then fit the thing into it. I suppose it's a slow way of working.
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 don't think the isolation of the American writer is a tradition; it's more that, geographically, he just is isolated, unless he happens to live in New York City. But I don't suppose there's a small town around the country that doesn't have a writer.
I don't think I've ever been either militant or profound as an anti-Fascist. When the issue has come up, when certain things have come up, and I've been called on to express - literally, when I've been cornered, then I take a left-wing stand.
If you write something, and you believe in it, you'd like to see sixty million people moved by it.
I am against censorship. I don't think there is anything more stupid than censorship.
Since I'm essentially optimistic, I can't imagine a world in which man is totally decimated or degraded.
New York is the place where they bind books and write blurbs and arrange the publicity and print the galleys... But Chicago is the place where the book is lived out before it is bound and the song is sung before it is recorded.
And never, ever, no matter what else you do in your whole life, never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Cutting
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.Collection: Writing
And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty.Collection: Example
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.Collection: Real
Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Book
...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.Collection: Littles
Thinking of Poe, thinking of Mark Twain and Vachel Lindsay, thinking of Jack London and Tom Wolfe, one begins to feel there is almost no way of becoming a creative writer in America without being a loser.Collection: America
For the masses who do the city's labor also keep the city's heart.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Fighting
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.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Work
I don't recommend being a bachelor, but it helps if you want to write.Collection: Writing
It is strange how fragile this man-creature is.....in one second he's just garbage. Garbage, that's all.Collection: Men
... Chicago divided your heart. Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it never can love you.Collection: Love You
To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Night
The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Love
(Chicago is) the only major city in the country where you can easily buy your way out of a murder rap.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Wall
There's people in hell who want ice water.Collection: Ice Water
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Alcohol
Never eat in a place called 'Mom's'.Collection: Mom