Nelson Algren Quotes

    "You ever been arrested before?"    "No sir. This is my first time."    "The first time this wee...

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

You can't be a good writer in the States anymore because to be a good one you have to have a country...

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

I am the penny whistle of American literature.

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

Along the pavement-colored hall doors stood half open on either side, all the way down; each one was...

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar respo...

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.

A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is be...

Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman ...

I don't know what kind of great I'm bound to be," Dove considered his prospects calmly, "all I know ...

But nothing was said about chicken farming anymore. Once, long after it was too late for farming, he...

...he said, with sort of a little derisive smile, "How can you walk down the street with all this st...

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

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

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

That's how it's always been: I was always in the clear so long as I was truly guilty. But the minute...

The devil lives in a double-shot", Roman explains himself obscurely. "I got a great worm inside. Gna...

Actually, they fought to fill the emptiness of their lives as they filled their empty glasses. They ...

She was neither widow nor mother: she only yearned for the dignity of a woman who had once belonged,...

He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone...

You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be...

I bet you think fellas are the ones to remember a girl -- don't you?"He shook his head hurriedly, th...

For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest ...

It's the place built out of Man's ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man's endless war ag...

Without hesitation, Dove chose the nowhere road. For that was the only place, in his heart of hearts...