Quotes by Nelson Algren

“Along the pavement-colored hall doors stood half open on either side, all the way down; each one was numbered in bright bald tin, each one stood just so much ajar in the gas-lit corridor. Just enou...”

“Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.”

“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.”

“Well, I may get drunk," the Widow admitted, "but I don't stagger. Sometimes I fall down. But I don't stagger.”

“Actually, they fought to fill the emptiness of their lives as they filled their empty glasses. They foughtnot because the liquor was in them, but because it did not fill them enough.”

“...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 goi...”

“Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.”

“You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative ...”

“"You ever been arrested before?" "No sir. This is my first time." "The first time this week, you mean." "Oh, I been arrested in Michigan. I thought you meant in Illinois. I never been arrested in I...”

“The clock in the room above the Safari told only Junkie Time. For every hour here was Old Junkie's Hour and the walls were the color of all old junkies' dreams: the hue of diluted morphine in the m...”

“‘But blow wise to this, buddy, blow wise to this: 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 l...”

“A writer who knows what he is doing isn't doing very much.”

“[About his legacy:] I'll be all right so long as it has been written on some corner of a human heart. On the heart, it doesn't matter how you spell it.”

“Thinking of Melville, thinking of Poe, thinking of Mark Twain and Vachel Lindsay, thinking of Jack London and Tom Wolfe, one begins to feel there is almost no way of becoming a creative writer in A...”

“[Chicago is] the only major city in the country where you can easily buy your way out of a murder rap.”

“A man who won't demean himself for a dollar is a phoney to my way of thinking.”

“What country is there for a white man who isn't white?”

“Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never play cards with a man named Doc. And never lay down with a woman who's got more troubles than you.”

“[About Chicago:] It's every man for himself in this hired air. / 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...”

“Nonconformity: Writing on Writing, written 1951–1953, posthumously released 1996. (Variant quotes can be seen from excerpts published as Things of the Earth: A Groundhog View in The California Quar...”