Nelson Algren Quotes
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I am against censorship. I don't think there is anything more stupid than censorship.
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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.
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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 well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.
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A writer who knows what he is doing isn't doing very much.
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It isn't till now, in the American Century, as we have recklessly dubbed it, that tribal pressures toward conformity have been brought to bear so ruthlessly upon men and women seeking to work creatively.
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Obsession remains the price of creation, and the writer who declines that risk will come up with nothing more creative than 'The Foxes of Harrow' or 'Mrs. Parkington.'
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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't outline and then fit the thing into it. I suppose it's a slow way of working.
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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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There's people in hell who want ice water.
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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.
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Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.
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A book, a true book, is the writer's 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.
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I'm not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don't think you get a true picture of people without it in writing... It's a kind of poetry, it's an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don't think anything is true that doesn't have it, that doesn't have poetry in it.
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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 don't recommend being a bachelor, but it helps if you want to write.
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Watch for a wild boy of no particular clan, ready for anything, always armed. Prefers fighting to toil, drink to fighting, chasing women to booze or battle: may attempt all three concurrently.
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To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.
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Never lie down with a woman who's got more troubles than you.
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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 writing as it is to armed robbery.
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For the masses who do the city's labor also keep the city's heart.
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I am the penny whistle of American literature.
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And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty.
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The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.
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... Chicago divided your heart. Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it never can love you.