Nelson Algren Quotes
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The reason nobody investigates the men who are trading off our freedoms for private enrichment is that they are the very ones who are doing the investigating.
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I always think of writing as a physical thing. I'm not trying to generalize, it just happens to be that way with me.
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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 town around the country that doesn't have a writer.
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Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.
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What country is there for a white man who isn't white?
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Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose.
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A man who won't demean himself for a dollar is a phoney to my way of thinking.
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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 any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards.
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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.
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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.
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The struggle to write with profundity of emotion and at the same time to live like a millionaire so exhausted F. Scott Fitzgerald that he was at last brought down to the point where he could no longer be both a good writer and a decent person.
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I'd put the ninety-nine billion dollars - whatever it is - that's being appropriated for the Air Force and the Navy, and I'd put it into schools. I'd put it into traveling scholarships.
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I don't think I've ever been either militant or profound as an anti-Fascist. When the issue has come up, when certain things have come up, and I've been called on to express - literally, when I've been cornered, then I take a left-wing stand.
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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 off from their deeper sources.
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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.
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Since I'm essentially optimistic, I can't imagine a world in which man is totally decimated or degraded.
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Chicago is the only major city in the country where you can easily buy your way out of a murder rap.
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I've always felt strongly that a writer shouldn't be engaged with other writers, or with people who make books, or even with people who read them. I think the farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources. I mean, a writer doesn't really live; he observes.
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If you write something, and you believe in it, you'd like to see sixty million people moved by it.
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I am against censorship. I don't think there is anything more stupid than censorship.
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New York is the place where they bind books and write blurbs and arrange the publicity and print the galleys... But Chicago is the place where the book is lived out before it is bound and the song is sung before it is recorded.
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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 America without being a loser.
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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.
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Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.