Quotes from Nelson Algren

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.

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.

It is strange how fragile this man-creature is.....in one second he's just garbage. Garbage, that's all.

Never eat in a place called 'Mom's'.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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 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.

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.

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' clinics, and the more I see of them, the more I'm sure it's the wrong direction. It isn't the place where you learn to write.

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.

If you write something, and you believe in it, you'd like to see sixty million people moved by it.

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.

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.

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.

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.

There's people in hell who want ice water.

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.

As certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.

The less he sees of other writers the more of a writer he will ultimately become. When he sees scarcely anyone except other writers, he is ready for New York.

If you feel you belong to things as they are, you won't hold up anyone in the alley no matter how hungry you may get. And you won't write anything that anyone will read a second time either.