Nelson Algren quotes

Nelson Algren was an American writer best known for his gritty novels about life on the margins of society. His works, such as "The Man with the Golden Arm," depicted the struggles of working-class Americans and dealt with themes of addiction, poverty, and hope. He is remembered as a significant voice in 20th-century American literature. Here are 48 of his quotes:

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.

Nelson Algren

A writer who knows what he is doing isn't doing very much.

Nelson Algren

[Chicago is] the only major city in the country where you can easily buy your way out of a murder rap.

Nelson Algren

Thinking of Melville, thinking of Poe, thinking of Mark Twain and Vachel Lindsay, thinking of Jack London and Tom Wolfe, one begins to feel there is almost no way of becoming a creative writer in America without being a loser.

Nelson Algren

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.

Nelson Algren

... 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.

Nelson Algren

Living in a very dense area, you're conscious of how the people underneath live, and you have a certain feeling toward them – so much so that you'd rather live among them than with the business classes. In a historical sense, it might be related to an idea, but you write out of – well, I wouldn't call it indignation, but a kind of irritability that these people on top should be so contented, so absolutely unaware of these other people, and so sure that their values are the right ones. I mean, there's a certain satisfaction in recording the people underneath, whose values are as sound as theirs, and a lot funnier, and a lot truer in a way. There's a certain overall satisfaction in kind of scooping up a shovelful of these people and dumping them in somebody's parlor.

Nelson Algren

[About his legacy:] I'll be all right so long as it has been written on some corner of a human heart. On the heart, it doesn't matter how you spell it.

Nelson Algren

What country is there for a white man who isn't white?

Nelson Algren

I always think of writing as a physical thing. I'm not trying to generalize, it just happens to be that way with me.

Nelson Algren

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.

Nelson Algren

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.

Nelson Algren

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

Nelson Algren

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.

Nelson Algren

I am the penny whistle of American literature.

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.

Nelson Algren

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

Nelson Algren

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.

Nelson Algren

A man who won't demean himself for a dollar is a phoney to my way of thinking.

Nelson Algren

[About whether critics have influenced his work:] None could have, because I don't read them. I doubt anyone does, except other critics. It seems like a sealed-off field with its own lieutenants, pretty much preoccupied with its own intrigues. I got a glimpse into the uses of a certain kind of criticism this past summer at a writers' conference – into how 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. I saw how it was possible to gain a chair of literature on no qualification other than persistence in nipping the heels of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck. I know, of course, that there are true critics, one or two. For the rest all I can say is, "Deal around me.”.

Nelson Algren

Life is hard by the yard, son. But you don't have to do it by the yard. By the inch it's a cinch. And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty.

Nelson Algren

Well, here you get to be a writer when there's absolutely nothing else you can do.

Nelson Algren