Quotes by Nelson Algren

“The American middle class's faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essence, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them...”

“To see life steadily, and see it whole, as a creature of the deep sees it, from below. Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely a...”

“We live today in a laboratory of human suffering as vast and terrible as that in which Dickens and Dostoevsky wrote. The only real difference being that the England of Dickens and the Russia of Dos...”

“Do American faces so often look so lost because they are most tragically trapped between a very real dread of coming alive to something more than merely existing, and an equal dread of going down t...”

“I've always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens – you know, until it finds its own plot – because you can'...”

“I don't know many writers. [...] Well, I dunno, but I do have the feeling that other writers can't help you with writing. I've gone to writers' conferences and writers' sessions and writers' clinic...”

“I don't think the isolation of the American writer is a tradition; it's more that geographically he just is isolated, unless he happens to live in New York City. But I don't suppose there's a small...”

“Well, I haven't consciously tried to develop [a style]. The only thing I've consciously tried to do was put myself in a position to hear the people I wanted to hear talk talk. I used the police lin...”

“I always think of writing as a physical thing. I'm not trying to generalize, it just happens to be that way with me.”

“Living in a very dense area, you're conscious of how the people underneath live, and you have a certain feeling toward them – so much so that you'd rather live among them than with the business cla...”

“[About whether critics have influenced his work:] None could have, because I don't read them. I doubt anyone does, except other critics. It seems like a sealed-off field with its own lieutenants, p...”

“Asked to name the best American authors of his day, Ernest Hemingway is said to have replied: Faulkner. (Pause.) Algren.”

“OK, kid, you beat Dostoevsky.”

“Algren makes his living grotesques so terribly human that their faces, voices, shames, follies and deaths, can linger in your mind with a strange midnight dignity. I join with Ernest Hemingway in h...”

“Two of his novels - A Walk on the Wild Side and The Man With the Golden Arm - and several of his short stories are now generally acknowledged to be literary triumphs. But all his life, Nelson Algre...”

“Perhaps Algren was our Cassandra: he was right when he argued for the significance of squalor and for the literary significance of the vast demographic of the dispossessed. The city was integral to...”

“[Nelson Algren] may be the funniest man around. Which is another way of saying he may be the most serious. At a time when pimpery, lick-spittlery, and picking the public's pocket are the order of t...”