Nelson Algren

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

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

“I am the penny whistle of American literature.”

“New York is the place where they bind books and write blurbs and arrange the publicity and print the galleys... But Chicago is the place where the book is lived out before it is bound and the song is sung before it is recorded.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Obsession remains the price of creation, and the writer who declines that risk will come up with nothing more creative than 'The Foxes of Harrow' or 'Mrs. Parkington.'”

“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.”

“If you write something, and you believe in it, you'd like to see sixty million people moved by it.”

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

“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.”