Nelson Algren Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Nelson Algren

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

For way down there, in a shot glass's false bottom, everything was bound to turn out fine after all. — Nelson Algren

The Irish 'n Polacks always get along- didn't ya ever notice? Irish 'n Polacks live on p'tatoes 'n got it in for Hitler, that's why they get along so good; all over the world. Never heard of no war between Poland 'n Ireland, did you? No sir, that's cause we're all Cath'lics. — 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

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. — Nelson Algren

"I'm a guy like this," Gino explained to Jeanie; "I like anythin' against the odds. I don't like nothin' safe. I'm a guy like this too: I don't like gettin' caught. But mostly I'm a guy like this: I don't like gettin' laughed at."
He lived as he drove, as he gambled and as he loved: for keeps. Taking no man's laughter. And letting the small stakes go. — 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

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

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

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

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.' — Nelson Algren

And the men come on again: the flashy and the penitent, the beaten ones and the wise guys, the hangdog heel thieves and the disdainful coneroos, walking, half crouched, through a downpour of light like men walking through rain. The frayed and the hesitant, the sleek and the bold, the odd fish and the callow youths, the good-humored bindle stiffs and the bitter veterans. — Nelson Algren

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

When we got 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 by cutting off those who don't have enough. If everybody has more than enough, what good is my more-than-enough? What good is a wide meadow open to everyone? It isn't until others are fenced out that the open pasture begins to have real value. What good is being a major if you can't have more than a second lieutenant? What good is a second lieutenant for that matter? — Nelson Algren

Nor all your piety nor all your preaching, nor all your crusades nor all your threats can stop one girl from going on the turf, can stop one mugging, can keep one promising youth from becoming a drug addict, so long as the force that drives the owners of our civilization is away from those who own nothing at all. — Nelson Algren

Heroin got the drive awright-but there's not a tingle to a ton-you got to get M to get the tingle-tingle. — Nelson Algren

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

And when I read one of those scapegoat pieces about the "viciousness" of drug pushers, and extolling the basic humanitarianism of the nark-squad hero, I'm saddened. Because it isn't Margo and it isn't Max who keeps the traffic moving: it's that same nark-squad hero with a small, brown paper bag that hustlers and pushers alike have to keep filled if they want to stay on the street. — 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

Since I'm essentially optimistic, I can't imagine a world in which man is totally decimated or degraded. — Nelson Algren

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

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

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. — Nelson Algren

Big-shot town, small-shot town, jet-propelled old-fashioned town, by old-world hands with new-world tools built into a place whose heartbeat carries farther than its shout, whose whispering in the night sounds less hollow than its roistering noontime laugh: they have builded a heavy-shouldered laughter here who went to work too young. — 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

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. — Nelson Algren

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

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

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

There is no way of being a creative writer in America without being a loser. — 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

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

So he bought tickets to the Greyhound and they climbed, painfully, inch by inch and with the knowledge that, once they reached the top, there would be one breath-taking moment when the car would tip precariously into space, over an incline six stories steep and then plunge, like a plunging plane. She buried her head against him, fearing to look at the park spread below. He forced himself to look: thousands of little people and hundreds of bright little stands, and over it all the coal-smoke pall of the river factories and railroad yards. He saw in that moment the whole dim-lit city on the last night of summer; the troubled streets that led to the abandoned beaches, the for-rent signs above overnight hotels and furnished basement rooms, moving trolleys and rising bridges: the cagework city, beneath a coalsmoke sky. — 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

"You ever been arrested before?"
"No sir. This is my first time."
"The first time this week, you mean."
"Oh, I been arrested in Michigan. I thought you meant in Illinois. I never been arrested in Illinois. I never did no wrong in Illinois."
"What good does that do you?"
"It don't. It's just that I love my state so much I go to Michigan to steal," he explained with an expression almost beatific. — 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

Belonging nowhere, no one can tell who he really is. Who one really is depends on what world he belongs to. The secret multitudes who belong to no world, no way of life, no particular time and place, are the truly displaced persons: displaced from their true selves. They are not the disinherited: they are those who have disinherited their own selves. — Nelson Algren

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

I couldn't buy the lice off a sick cat, the cabbie answered from the very depths of self-deprecation. — Nelson Algren

If you write something, and you believe in it, you'd like to see sixty million people moved by it. — Nelson Algren

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

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

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

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. — Nelson Algren

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. — Nelson Algren

These will suffice; who knows but we may be on a slope which leads down to
aboriginal savagery. But of this 1 am sure: if we are to escape, we must not yield a foot upon demanding a fair field and an honest race to all ideas. — Nelson Algren

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. — Nelson Algren

If you feel you belong to things as they are, you won't hold up anyone in the alley no matter how hungry you may get. And you won't write anything that anyone will read a second time either. — 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

Well, we all have our good days.
That one bad night can ruin. — Nelson Algren

The city divided by the river is further divided by racial and lingual differences. — Nelson Algren

When I burn please bury me deep
Somewhere on West Division Street
Put a bottle beneat' my head
'n a bottle beneat' my feet — Nelson Algren

In this neighborhood, with only forty-five cents, you're a bum. But Sobotnik, even with two dollars, he's still a bum. — 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

A city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to forge out of steel and blood-red neon its own peculiar wilderness. — 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

faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose. Such fears as these are a solvent that can eat out the cement that binds the stones together; they may in the end subject us to a despotism as evil as any that we dread; and they can be allayed only in so far as we refuse to proceed on suspicion, and trust one another until we have tangible ground for misgiving. The mutual confidence on which all else depends can be maintained only by an open mind and a brave reliance upon free discussion. I do not say that — Nelson Algren

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. — Nelson Algren

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

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. — Nelson Algren

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. — Nelson Algren

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

Then the wooden benches along the walls, where so many outcasts had slept, would be lit by a sort of slow, clocked lightning til the bulb steadied and fastened its tiny feral fury upon the center of the room like a single sullen and manic eye. To burn on there with a steady hate. Til morning wearied and dimmed it away to nothing more than some sort of little old lost gray child of a district-station moon, all its hatred spent. — Nelson Algren

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. — 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

American literature isn't anybody phoning to anybody or anybody writing about anybody. American literature is the woman in the courtroom who, finding herself undefended on a charge, asked, 'Isn't anybody on my side?' It's also the phrase I used that was once used in court of a kid who, on being sentenced to death, said, 'I knew I'd never get to be twenty-one anyhow. — Nelson Algren

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

I am the penny whistle of American literature. — Nelson Algren

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. — 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

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

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

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. — 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

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

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

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

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

I am against censorship. I don't think there is anything more stupid than censorship. — Nelson Algren