Quotes from Nelson Algren

Psaní dává lidskému životu urÃ…â"¢itou d?stojnost. I kdyby to nikdy nikdo ne?etl, aspo? nÄ›co dÄ›láte. Pracujete na té nejd?ležitÄ›jÅ¡í vÄ›ci... RozhodnÄ› je to lepÅ¡í než psát reklamní texty. Neutloukáte se aspo? v plytkostech. A máte Å¡anci pohovoÃ…â"¢it si s tÄ›mi, kteÃ…â"¢í se dosud nenarodili.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

She was neither widow nor mother: she only yearned for the dignity of a woman who had once belonged, somewhere, to somebody. She had belonged to no one, for she had never wanted chick nor child. Her idea of home had been any side-alley entrance and a pint of tinted gin. All she had ever striven for was small change left lying by strangers on North Clark Street bars; and any man's bottle at all.

American literature isn't anybody phoning to anybody or anybody writing about anybody. American literature is the woman in the courtroom who, finding herself undefended on a charge, asked, 'Isn't anybody on my side?' It's also the phrase I used that was once used in court of a kid who, on being sentenced to death, said, 'I knew I'd never get to be twenty-one anyhow.

In this neighborhood, with only forty-five cents, you're a bum. But Sobotnik, even with two dollars, he's still a bum.

When we can... place a government employee under charges because unidentified informants alleged that 'his convictions on the question of civil rights extended slightly beyond that of the average individual,' it is time to call a halt.

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

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.

Since I'm essentially optimistic, I can't imagine a world in which man is totally decimated or degraded.

I am against censorship. I don't think there is anything more stupid than censorship.

Never lie down with a woman who's got more troubles than you.

When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don't have enough.

Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose.

Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are greater than your own.

A Walk on the Wild Side

He had met him before, that certain down-at-heel vet growing stooped from carrying a thirty-five-pound monkey on his back.

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

[On Chicago:] 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.

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.

Never sleep with someone whose troubles are worse than your own.

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.

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.

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.

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