Nelson Algren

When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can…

— Nelson Algren

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

— Nelson Algren

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.

— Nelson Algren

“Without hesitation, Dove chose the nowhere road. For that was the only place, in his heart of hearts, that he really wanted…

— 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…

— Nelson Algren

Never eat in a place called 'Mom's'.

— Nelson Algren

“Nor all your piety nor all your preaching, nor all your crusades nor all your threats can stop one girl from going…

— Nelson Algren

“A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.”

— Nelson Algren

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

— 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…

— 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

“faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists,…

— Nelson Algren

“And when I read one of those scapegoat pieces about the "viciousness" of drug pushers, and extolling the basic humanitarianism of the…

— Nelson Algren

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

— Nelson Algren

“If Jesus Christ treated me like you do, I’d drive in the nails myself.”

— Nelson Algren

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

— Nelson Algren

“these will suffice; who knows but we may be on a slope which leads down to aboriginal savagery. But of this 1…

— Nelson Algren

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer…

— Nelson Algren

“...a city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to forge out of steel…

— Nelson Algren

“So he bought tickets to the Greyhound and they climbed, painfully, inch by inch and with the knowledge that, once they reached…

— 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.…

— Nelson Algren

“The city divided by the river is further divided by racial and lingual differences.”

— Nelson Algren

“Then the wooden benches along the walls, where so many outcasts had slept, would be lit by a sort of slow, clocked…

— Nelson Algren

...he said, with sort of a little derisive smile, "How can you walk down the street with all this stuff going on…

— Nelson Algren

There's people in hell who want ice water.

— Nelson Algren