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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.
Nelson Algren
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Nelson Algren
Age: 72 †
Born: 1909
Born: March 28
Died: 1981
Died: May 9
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Society
Pity
Write
Essential
Ruthlessness
Sense
Blow
Robbery
Certain
Essentials
Alienation
Writing
Safe
Armed
Novel
Vague
Rich
Sheer
Creative
Longing
More quotes by Nelson Algren
Never lie down with a woman who's got more troubles than you.
Nelson Algren
There's people in hell who want ice water.
Nelson Algren
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.
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
Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.
Nelson Algren
Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.
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
It is strange how fragile this man-creature is.....in one second he's just garbage. Garbage, that's all.
Nelson Algren
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.
Nelson Algren
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.
Nelson Algren
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.
Nelson Algren
... Chicago divided your heart. Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it never can love you.
Nelson Algren
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.
Nelson Algren
The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.
Nelson Algren
To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.
Nelson Algren
One of the best things Henry Miller ever said was that art goes all out. It's all out. It goes full length. . . . A big book is an all-out book in which you limit your life to things that pertain directly to the book.
Nelson Algren
For the masses who do the city's labor also keep the city's heart.
Nelson Algren
And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty.
Nelson Algren
