Nelson Algren Quotes

The struggle to write with profundity of emotion and at the same time to live like a millionaire so exhausted F. Scott Fitzgerald that he was at last brought down to the point where he could no longer be both a good writer and a decent person.

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.

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.

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.’

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

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

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.

I don’t think the isolation of the American writer is a tradition; it’s more that, geographically, he just is isolated, unless he happens to live in New York City. But I don’t suppose there’s a small town around the country that doesn’t have a writer.

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.

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.

It isn’t till now, in the American Century, as we have recklessly dubbed it, that tribal pressures toward conformity have been brought to bear so ruthlessly upon men and women seeking to work creatively.