97 Quotes by Nelson Algren

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: may attempt all three concurrently.

The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.

I don't recommend being a bachelor, but it helps if you want to write.

It is strange how fragile this man-creature is.....in one second he's just garbage. Garbage, that's all.

There's people in hell who want ice water.

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

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 ...

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.

Never lie down with a woman who's got more troubles than you.