“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 Copy Share Image
When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves,… — Nelson Algren Copy Share Image
“For way down there, in a shot glass's false bottom, everything was bound to turn out fine after all.” — Nelson Algren Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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,… — Nelson Algren Copy Share Image
“Nor all your piety nor all your preaching, nor all your crusades nor all your threats can stop one girl from going on the… — Nelson Algren Copy Share Image
“A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.” — Nelson Algren Copy Share Image
“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… — Nelson Algren Copy Share Image
Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity. — Nelson Algren Copy Share Image
“faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win… — Nelson Algren Copy Share Image
“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,… — Nelson Algren Copy Share Image
There is no way of being a creative writer in America without being a loser. — Nelson Algren Copy Share Image
“If Jesus Christ treated me like you do, I’d drive in the nails myself.” — Nelson Algren Copy Share Image
