Nelson Algren Quotes

We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.

I wrote a great deal of verse. In fact, every time I fell in love, which was rather often, I burst into the emotional sort of thing which is perennially salable.

Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent.

Poets, when they write of love, give themselves and everyone else away!

One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.

The only rule I have when writing is to try to tell the truth. That doesn't mean you can't exaggerate, edit, rewrite things to make them more dramatic. But emotional truth is what I look for in writing.

In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.

There are two versions to every poem – the crying version and the straight version

If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.

I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.

I used to think of that line in Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl', about the 'sad cup of coffee'.. ..I have had cold coffee and hot coffee and lousy coffee, But I've never had a sad cup of coffee.

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.

If I write a fantastic story, I'm not writing something willful. On the contrary, I am writing something that stands for my feelings, or for my thoughts. So that, in a sense, a fantastic story is as real and perhaps more real than a mere circumstantial story. Because after all, circumstances come and go, and symbols remain.

And still as an adult like I do as well, you know what I mean like I literally just cried in the first interview that I had today. Like, I'm just a very emotional human.

After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations.

great writers are indecent people they live unfairly saving the best part for paper. good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal. if you read this after I am dead it means I made it.

My own view is simply that there are some very basic rules; very simple rules that apply to all writing in a way, which is: don't lie; if you're wrong, correct; do not misrepresent; and try and keep oneself intellectually honest - which means, as a writer, the very difficult task in public of admitting you were wrong.

The act of writing means you wish to communicate. Whether you're writing a memoir for yourself you put in a drawer, or you write a poem and you send it to a little magazine, or you write for publication, it always means - the form follows function.

Just because you have the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn't mean we all have.

Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.

John could write a mean song. He had a lot of venom in him. Whereas I had a happy childhood.

Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize