Quotes by : 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....

I don't know what kind of great I'm bound to be," Dove considered his prospects calmly, "all I know for....

Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in....

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

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

I am the penny whistle of American literature.

You can't be a good writer in the States anymore because to be a good one you have to have a country....

The devil lives in a double-shot", Roman explains himself obscurely. "I got a great worm inside. Gnaws....

...he said, with sort of a little derisive smile, "How can you walk down the street with all this stuff....

But nothing was said about chicken farming anymore. Once, long after it was too late for farming, he....