Quotes by Nelson Algren

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

“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 insofar as no personal risk is entailed. Meaning he loves no one, worthy or no. This is what makes him impossible.”

“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.”

“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 of town Tuesday.”

“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 play cards with any man named Doc. Never eat at any place called Moms. And never, never, no matter what else you do in your whole life, never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own.”

“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.”

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

For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest imaginative writer that ever brooded in a lavender robe and a mellowed briar in his teeth, couldnt tell you, though e try for a lifetime, how the simplest strap-hanger will ask the conductor to be let off at the next stop. ...It is all for the taking. All the manuals by frustrated fictioneers on how to write cant give you the first syllable of reality, at any cot, that any common conversation can. All the classics, read and re-read, cant help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first-hand.

Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Moms. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.

You dont 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 writing as it is to armed robbery.

A book, a true book, is the writers 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.

Its the place built out of Mans ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Mans 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.

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.

She was neither widow nor mother: she only yearned for the dignity of a woman who had once belonged, somewhere, to somebody. She had belonged to no one, for she had never wanted chick nor child. Her idea of home had been any side-alley entrance and a pint of tinted gin. All she had ever striven for was small change left lying by strangers on North Clark Street bars; and any mans bottle at all.

... Chicago divided your heart. Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it never can love you.

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

I bet you think fellas are the ones to remember a girl -- dont you?He shook his head hurriedly, that hed always thought that.Fellas have all the fun n she just sees one right after another, so it seems like HED remember her, better n SHED remember him, only it works the other way around. I aint forgot one single fella, all these years. But I bet there aint TWO d know me from a big of bananas this minute.

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.