Nelson Algren Quotes

31 quotes in 477 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.
• 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…
• Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose.
• 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…
• It is strange how fragile this man-creature is.....in one second he's just garbage. Garbage, that's all.
• I don't recommend being a bachelor, but it helps if you want to write.
• 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.
• There's people in hell who want ice water.
• To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.
• There is no way of being a creative writer in America without being a loser.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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...…
• For the masses who do the city's labor also keep the city's heart.
• Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.
• 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…
• Never lie down with a woman who's got more troubles than you.
• 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…

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