Quotes from Nelson Algren

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.

Jane Addams too knew that Chicago's blood was hustler's blood. Knowing that Chicago, like John the Baptist and Bathhouse John, like Billy Sunday and Big Bill, forever keeps two faces, one for winners and one for losers, one for hustlers and one for squares.

Nor all your piety nor all your preaching, nor all your crusades nor all your threats can stop one girl from going on the turf, can stop one mugging, can keep one promising youth from becoming a drug addict, so long as the force that drives the owners of our civilization is away from those who own nothing at all.

Then the wooden benches along the walls, where so many outcasts had slept, would be lit by a sort of slow, clocked lightning til the bulb steadied and fastened its tiny feral fury upon the center of the room like a single sullen and manic eye. To burn on there with a steady hate. Til morning wearied and dimmed it away to nothing more than some sort of little old lost gray child of a district-station moon, all its hatred spent.

these will suffice; who knows but we may be on a slope which leads down to aboriginal savagery. But of this 1 am sure: if we are to escape, we must not yield a foot upon demanding a fair field and an honest race to all ideas.

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.

Well, we all have our good days. That one bad night can ruin.

For way down there, in a shot glass's false bottom, everything was bound to turn out fine after all.

The writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.

And when I read one of those scapegoat pieces about the viciousness of drug pushers, and extolling the basic humanitarianism of the nark-squad hero, I'm saddened. Because it isn't Margo and it isn't Max who keeps the traffic moving: it's that same nark-squad hero with a small, brown paper bag that hustlers and pushers alike have to keep filled if they want to stay on the street.

I couldn't buy the lice off a sick cat, the cabbie answered from the very depths of self-deprecation.

Heroin got the drive awright-but there's not a tingle to a ton-you got to get M to get the tingle-tingle.

I don't know what kind of great I'm bound to be, Dove considered his prospects calmly, all I know for certain is I'm born a world-shaker.

I'm a guy like this, Gino explained to Jeanie; I like anythin' against the odds. I don't like nothin' safe. I'm a guy like this too: I don't like gettin' caught. But mostly I'm a guy like this: I don't like gettin' laughed at.     He lived as he drove, as he gambled and as he loved: for keeps. Taking no man's laughter. And letting the small stakes go.

That's how it's 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.

He's just a pore lonesome wife-left fellar.

Well, I may get drunk, the Widow admitted, but I don't stagger. Sometimes I fall down. But I don't stagger.

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

I write at high speed because boredom is bad for my health.

I am the penny whistle of American literature.

Belonging nowhere, no one can tell who he really is. Who one really is depends on what world he belongs to. The secret multitudes who belong to no world, no way of life, no particular time and place, are the truly displaced persons: displaced from their true selves. They are not the disinherited: they are those who have disinherited their own selves.

Any time you want me, Captain, just phone by Antek, he'll come 'n tell me I got to come down 'n get arrested. I like gettin' locked up now 'n then, it's how a guy stays out of trouble. I'll grab a cab if you're in a real big hurry to pinch me sometime—I don't like bein' late when I got a chance of doin' thirty days for somethin' I never done.

Tonight, just as the wan winter-evening light fanned out into all the colors of the hustlers' night, God tossed a handful of city rain across the green and red tavern legends like tossing a handful of red and green confetti. Overhead the wavering warning lamps of the El began casting a blood-colored light down the rails to guide the empty cars of evening down all the nameless tunnels of the night.

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; he may attempt all three concurrently.