quotes by 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)

"Never sleep with someone whose troubles are worse than your own."
— 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. Never let nobody talk you into shaking another man's jolt, And never you cop an other man's plea. I've tried 'em all and I know. They don't work."
— Nelson Algren

"...to forge, out of steel and blood-red neon, its own peculiar wilderness. "
— 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

"“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: 50th Anniversary Edition, Newly Annotated)

"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

"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