Nelson Algren Quotes:- Nelson Algren (March 28, 1909 – May 9, 1981) was an American writer. Algren may be best known for The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), a novel that won the National Book Award and was adapted as the 1955 film of the same name.
Inspirational Nelson Algren Quotes
“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.”-Nelson Algren
“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.”-Nelson Algren
“I’ve always felt strongly that a writer shouldn’t be engaged with other writers, or with people who make books, or even with people who read them. I think the farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources. I mean, a writer doesn’t really live; he observes.”-Nelson Algren
“The struggle to write with the 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.”-Nelson Algren
“I do have the feeling that other writers can’t help you with writing. I’ve gone to writers’ conferences and writers’ sessions and writers’ clinics, and the more I see of them, the more I’m sure it’s the wrong direction. It isn’t the place where you learn to write.”-Nelson Algren
Famous Nelson Algren Quotes
“The reason nobody investigates the men who are trading off our freedoms for private enrichment is that they are the very ones who are doing the investigating.”-Nelson Algren
“I don’t think I’ve ever been either militant or profound as an anti-Fascist. When the issue has come up, when certain things have come up, and I’ve been called on to express – literally, when I’ve been cornered, then I take a left-wing stand.”-Nelson Algren
“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.”-Nelson Algren
“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.'”-Nelson Algren
“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.”-Nelson Algren
“Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.”-Nelson Algren
“Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose.”-Nelson Algren
“If you write something, and you believe in it, you’d like to see sixty million people moved by it.”-Nelson Algren
“I am against censorship. I don’t think there is anything more stupid than censorship.”-Nelson Algren
