Quotes by Nelson Algren

You cant be a good writer in the States anymore because to be a good one you have to have a country where you can be poor and still eat, and still make your living standard secondary to your writing. Thoreau himself couldnt do that in the States today.

I am the penny whistle of American literature.

But nothing was said about chicken farming anymore. Once, long after it was too late for farming, he might catch her crying and pet her a bit. Whats the matter, little baby? You got a fever? You want to take the night off? She might murmur something about candling eggs, but he wouldnt be able to understand what she meant. And after a while she cried on without knowing what she meant either, as a girl cries over a bad dream long after the dream is forgotten.In time the tears dried. She could no longer cry over anything. All the tears had been shed, all the laughs had been had; all the long spent. Leaving nothing to do but to sit stupefied, night after night, under lights made soft beside music with a beat, to rise automatically when someone wearing pants pointed a finger and said that one there.

I dont know what kind of great Im bound to be, Dove considered his prospects calmly, all I know for certain is Im born a world-shaker.

Thats how its always been: I was always in the clear so long as I was truly guilty. But the minute my motives were honest someone would finger me.

    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 Illinois. I never did no wrong in Illinois.    What good does that do you?    It dont. Its just that I love my state so much I go to Michigan to steal, he explained with an expression almost beatific.

He was falling between glacial walls, he didnt know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-coloured walls...

Without hesitation, Dove chose the nowhere road. For that was the only place, in his heart of hearts, that he really wanted to go.

The farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.

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 enough to reveal half-dressed men and women waiting for the rain or about to make love or already through loving and about to get drunk; or already half drunk and beginning to argue about how soon it was going to rain or whose turn it was to run down for whisky or whether it was time to make love again or forget it for once and just wait for rain.

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 dont stagger. Sometimes I fall down. But I dont stagger.

Actually, they fought to fill the emptiness of their lives as they filled their empty glasses. They fought—not 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 dont know how you can walk down the street with nothing going on inside you.

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.

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

“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.”