Nelson Algren

New York is the place where they bind books and write blurbs and arrange the publicity and print the galleys... But Chicago is the place where the book is lived out before it is bound and the song is sung before it is recorded.

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.

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.

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

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.

I'd put the ninety-nine billion dollars - whatever it is - that's being appropriated for the Air Force and the Navy, and I'd put it into schools. I'd put it into traveling scholarships.

Since I'm essentially optimistic, I can't imagine a world in which man is totally decimated or degraded.

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

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.'

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 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.