You can't be a good writer in the States anymore because to be a good one you have to have a country where you can be poor and still eat, and still make your living standard secondary to your writing. Thoreau himself couldn't do that in the States today.

Nelson Algren
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Sometimes I feel like we're a knot, too tangled to be taken apart. - Kiera Cass

  2. Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years. - Willa Cather

  3. Learning the truth has become my life's love. - Dan Brown

  4. I am not a victim. No matter what I have been through, I'm still here. I have a history of victory. - Steve Maraboli

  5. It is better to fill your head with useless knowledge than no knowledge at all. - Jim Hinckley

More Quotes By Nelson Algren
  1. To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]

  2. Morality only is eternal. All the rest is balloon and bubble from the cradle to the grave.

  3. Let the children have their night of fun and laughter. Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before...

  4. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.", July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)

  5. No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.", NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 2003)

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