Nelson Algren Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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

...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.

...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.

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

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.

There's people in hell who want ice water.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 ...

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

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

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...

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

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

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.

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.

The less he sees of other writers the more of a writer he will ultimately become. When he sees scarcely anyone except other writers, he is ready for New York.

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)

If you feel you belong to things as they are, you won’t hold up anyone in the alley no matter how hungry you may get. And you won’t write anything that anyone will read a second time either.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Return along old walks where thrusts of grass by force of love have split the measure stone.

So he bought tickets to the Greyhound and they climbed, painfully, inch by inch and with the knowledge that, once they reached the top, there would be one breath-taking moment when the car would tip precariously into space, over an incline six stories steep and then plunge, like a plunging plane. She buried her head against him, fearing to look at the park spread below. He forced himself to look: thousands of little people and hundreds of bright little stands, and over it all the coal-smoke pall of the river factories and railroad yards. He saw in that moment the whole dim-lit city on the last night of summer; the troubled streets that led to the abandoned beaches, the for-rent signs above overnight hotels and furnished basement rooms, moving trolleys and rising bridges: the cagework city, beneath a coalsmoke sky.

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.

I once had a brawl in a pool hall—convincingly demonstrating, although never to Nelson Algren and not in his presence, that wrestling is superior to boxing—because a fellow student at Iowa, a boxer, had called Mr. Vonnegut a ‘science-fiction hack.

It has never been very easy for me to live, though I am always very happy—maybe because I want so much to be happy. I like so much to live and I hate the idea of dying one day. And then I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life, I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, and to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish... You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.

For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest imaginative writer that ever brooded in a lavender robe and a mellowed briar in his teeth, couldn't tell you, though e try for a lifetime, how the simplest strap-hanger will ask the conductor to be let off at the next stop. ... It is all for the taking. All the manuals by frustrated fictioneers on how to write can't give you the first syllable of reality, at any cot, that any common conversation can. All the classics, read and re-read, can't help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first-hand.

When we got 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 by cutting off those who don't have enough. If everybody has more than enough, what good is my more-than-enough? What good is a wide meadow open to everyone? It isn't until others are fenced out that the open pasture begins to have real value. What good is being a major if you can't have more than a second lieutenant? What good is a second lieutenant for that matter?

I am the penny whistle of American literature.

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.

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.

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

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.

C'est exactement ça qu'est la littérature après tout : d'habiles mensonges qui secrètement disent la vérité.

On the other side of the window a prairie snow fell across backstreet and tenement, looking for dry leaves upon which to rest and finding only concrete and steel.

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

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.

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.

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.

    "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.

    "You ever been arrested before?"     "No sir. This is my first time."     "The first time this week, you mean."     "Oh, I been arrested in Michigan. I thought you meant in Illinois. I never been arrested in Illinois. I never did no wrong in Illinois."     "What good does that do you?"     "It don't. It's just that I love my state so much I go to Michigan to steal," he explained with an expression almost beatific.

faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose. Such fears as these are a solvent that can eat out the cement that binds the stones together; they may in the end subject us to a despotism as evil as any that we dread; and they can be allayed only in so far as we refuse to proceed on suspicion, and trust one another until we have tangible ground for misgiving. The mutual confidence on which all else depends can be maintained only by an open mind and a brave reliance upon free discussion. I do not say that

But nothing was said about chicken farming anymore. Once, long after it was too late for farming, he might catch her crying and pet her a bit. 'What's the matter, little baby? You got a fever? You want to take the night off?' She might murmur something about candling eggs, but he wouldn't be able to understand what she meant. And after a while she cried on without knowing what she meant either, as a girl cries over a bad dream long after the dream is forgotten. In time the tears dried. She could no longer cry over anything. All the tears had been shed, all the laughs had been had; all the long spent. Leaving nothing to do but to sit stupefied, night after night, under lights made soft beside music with a beat, to rise automatically when someone wearing pants pointed a finger and said 'that one there.

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.

Frankie turned away. It seemed that everything that ever happened to him had begun with some hound or other’s aimless yapping.

Psaní dává lidskému životu urřitou důstojnost. I kdyby to nikdy nikdo nečetl, aspoň něco děláte. Pracujete na té nejdůležitější věci... Rozhodně je to lepší než psát reklamní texty. Neutloukáte se aspoň v plytkostech. A máte šanci pohovořit si s těmi, kteří se dosud nenarodili.

Kaplumbağaların kralıydı o. Kral, kibirli yüzgeçlerini zaferle salladığı an -"Yukarıda her zaman bir başkasına yer var"-başka bir şey sırtına bindi ve kısa günü son buldu. Kayarak, yayılarak, yuvarlanarak kanlı yığından aşağı indi ve masanın altına sırtüstü düşerek çılgınca debelenmeye koyuldu. "Sevgili dostlar ve kibar yürekler," -soğuğun sürünerek gelişini hissederek çırpındı- "öylece durup eski dostunuzun ölümünü mü seyredeceksiniz? Kendim için hiçbir şey istemedim ben; ne para, ne rahat, ne güç, ne emniyet. Bunlar için çabaladım, çünkü bunlar beni çok istedi. (Tabii işime geldiğinde, arada paylaştım da hepsini.) Sahiden beni ölüme mi bırakacaksınız?" "Tamam iyi yedim. Ama o, sırf çilekeş fedakârlık günlerimde gücümü korumak içindi. Çünkü ben, önüme çıkmadıkça hiçbir kardeş yaratığa zarar vermedim. Kazancım yoksa adaletsiz avantajlara hiç sarılmadım. Sahiden bu tatlı kaplumbağayı ölüme terk edebilecek misiniz?" "Adanmış bir baba, sadık bir yurttaş, inançlı bir işçi, kibar bir işveren, ilgili bir komşuydum; düzenli gittim kiliseye. Kalbimin tüm saflığıyla Tanrı ve insanın kanunlarına saygı gösterdim. Safım ve kodes korkusuyla doluyum. Sahiden öylece durup böylesi aziz bir kaplumbağanın ölümünü izleyebilir misiniz?" "Az önce, kardeşlerimin boğazlarına basıp geçerken biraz gergin göründüğümü söylersiniz şimdi. İtiraf ediyorum -ama o az önceydi- ve artık değiştim ben. Böylesi açık fikirli bir kaplumbağanın ölümüne dayanabilir misiniz? "Kaldırın beni, bir el verin kibar yürekler, kaldırın da bir zamanlar hükmettiğim şu zirveye bir daha bakabileyim." Ve ardından ağır ağır indi karanlık. Yüzgeçleri katılaştı. Mücadelesi ebediyen bitti. Kaplumbağaların en bilgesi ölmüştü.

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.

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.

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.

Along the pavement-colored hall doors stood half open on either side, all the way down; each one was numbered in bright bald tin, each one stood just so much ajar in the gas-lit corridor. Just enough to reveal half-dressed men and women waiting for the rain or about to make love or already through loving and about to get drunk; or already half drunk and beginning to argue about how soon it was going to rain or whose turn it was to run down for whisky or whether it was time to make love again or forget it for once and just wait for rain.

And the men come on again: the flashy and the penitent, the beaten ones and the wise guys, the hangdog heel thieves and the disdainful coneroos, walking, half crouched, through a downpour of light like men walking through rain. The frayed and the hesitant, the sleek and the bold, the odd fish and the callow youths, the good-humored bindle stiffs and the bitter veterans.

I saw Trout Fishing in America Shorty passed out in the front window of a Filipino laundromat. He was sitting in his wheelchair with closed eyes staring out the window. There was a tranquil expression on his face. He almost looked human. He had probably fallen asleep while he was having his brains washed in one of the machines. (from "The Shipping of Trout Fishing in America Shorty to Nelson Algren", page 47)

The American writer as often as not is a middle-aged man with a wife and children, two or three books behind him, and eleven dollars in his pocket. He’s up against a conglomerate that deals in millions. He will take what they offer.

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.

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

It kills me in the heart, how you are now,” Sparrow couldn’t keep from saying. “It just ain’t like bein’ Frankie no more.” “That’s the hardest thing of all for me to be, Solly,” Frankie told him with a strange gentleness. “I’m gettin’ farther away from myself all the time.

For the man on the needle, though he be your brother, is a stranger to every human who lives without morphine.

Though he had seen not one man of them in his life before, Frankie knew each man. For each was seared by that same torch whose flame had already touched himself. A torch which burned with a dark and smoldering flame from within till it dried a man of everything save a dark-charred guilt.

Nelson Algren wrote once that “literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.

He’s like me,” Frankie explained, “never drinks. Unless he’s alone or with somebody.

The great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one. Guilt that lay crouched behind every billboard which gave each man his commandments; for each man here had failed the billboards all down the line. No Ford in this one’s future nor ever any place all his own. Had failed before the radio commercials, by the streetcar plugs and by the standards of every self-respecting magazine. With his own eyes he had seen the truer Americans mount the broad stone stairways to success surely and swiftly and unaided by others; he was always the one left alone, it seemed at last, without enough sense of honor to climb off a West Madison Street Keep-Our-City-Clean box and not enough ambition to raise his eyes back to the billboards.

For those nearest our hearts are the ones most likely to tread upon them.

Must be good whisky you’re sellin’, Owner,” Frankie had flattered Antek. “They come in here on crutches ’n walk out by theirselves.

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.

The idea astonished him. He wrote later that being able to love only contingently meant being able to live only contingently. If she did not play a direct role in Sartre’s work and she was not sleeping with him, why did she need to be with him all the time? For now Nelson was

I don't plan to cut you," Hallie told him quietly. "I got cut once myself. I won't scratch you because I don't like to see a man walking around with scratches on his face. I won't throw acid in your eyes because it makes me sorry to see a blind person. All I'll do is kill you where you stand. If you get through the door I'll kill you on the stair. If you make the stair I'll kill you in the parlor. If you make the street I'll kill you on the curb. I'll kill you in the alley. I'll kill you in God's House. I'll kill you anywhere.