Quotes from Nelson Algren

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.

he said, with sort of a little derisive smile, "How can you walk down the street with all this stuff going on inside you?" I said, "I don't know how you can walk down the street with nothing going on inside you.

Chicago divided your heart. Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it never can love you.

a city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to forge out of steel and blood-red neon its own peculiar wilderness.

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.

The great trains howling from track to track all night. The taut and telegraphic murmur of ten thousand city wires, drawn most cruelly against a city sky. The rush of city waters, beneath the city streets. The passionate passing of the night's last El.

It's the place built out of Man's ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man's endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures. Making it the city of all cities most like Man himself— loneliest creation of all this very old poor earth.

And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty.

There's people in hell who want ice water.

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.

Big-shot town, small-shot town, jet-propelled old-fashioned town, by old-world hands with new-world tools built into a place whose heartbeat carries farther than its shout, whose whispering in the night sounds less hollow than its roistering noontime laugh: they have builded a heavy-shouldered laughter here who went to work too young.

When I burn please bury me deep Somewhere on West Division Street Put a bottle beneat' my head 'n a bottle beneat' my feet

Without hesitation, Dove chose the nowhere road. For that was the only place, in his heart of hearts, that he really wanted to go.

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.

The devil lives in a double-shot", Roman explains himself obscurely. "I got a great worm inside. Gnaws and gnaws. Every day I drown him and every day he gnaws. Help me drown the worm, fellas.

There is no way of being a creative writer in America without being a loser.

The Irish 'n Polacks always get along- didn't ya ever notice? Irish 'n Polacks live on p'tatoes 'n got it in for Hitler, that's why they get along so good; all over the world. Never heard of no war between Poland 'n Ireland, did you? No sir, that's cause we're all Cath'lics.

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 ...

He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-coloured walls...

If Jesus Christ treated me like you do, I'd drive in the nails myself.

You can't be a good writer in the States anymore... Because to be a good one you have to have a country where you can be poor and still eat, and still make your living standards secondary to your writing. Thoreau himself couldn't do that in the States today... (Sept. 1953 letter to Millen Brand)

I bet you think fellas are the ones to remember a girl -- don't you?" He shook his head hurriedly, that he'd always thought that. "Fellas have all the fun 'n she just sees one right after another, so it seems like HE'D remember her, better 'n SHE'D remember him, only it works the other way around. I ain't forgot one single fella, all these years. But I bet there ain't TWO 'd know me from a big of bananas this minute.

The farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.

The city divided by the river is further divided by racial and lingual differences.