Author Profile
Nelson Algren
1909 – 1981 • American • Novelist
22
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 22 quotesNew 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.— Nelson Algren
Since I'm essentially optimistic, I can't imagine a world in which man is totally decimated or degraded.— Nelson Algren
I am against censorship. I don't think there is anything more stupid than censorship.— 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
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