Nelson Algren > Quotes

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

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

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

“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.”
― Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side

“...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, Conversations with 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

“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

“Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty.”
― Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side

“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, Never Come Morning

“There's people in hell who want ice water.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm

“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, Never Come Morning

“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, Never Come Morning

“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

“...to forge, out of steel and blood-red neon, its own peculiar wilderness. ”
― 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, Never Come Morning

“you’ll know 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, Chicago: City on the Make

“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 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, The Neon Wilderness

“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

“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

“If Jesus Christ treated me like you do, I’d drive in the nails myself.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm

“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, The Man With the Golden Arm

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