Saul Bellow Quotes

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

The stillness in art characterizes prayer, and the eye of the storm.

I've discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.'

Human character is smaller now, people don't have durable passions; they've replaced passions with excitement.

There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

She was what we used to call a suicide blonde - dyed by her own hand.

Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.

A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.

No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

Also, he was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage; it is harder to find out how he feels.

A writer is in the broadest sense a spokesman of his community. Through him that community comes to know its heart. Without such knowledge, how long can it survive?

The body, she says, is subject to the force of gravity. But the soul is ruled by levity, pure.

Live or die but don't poison everything.

I have begun in old age to understand...that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others.

Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything

A man must have limits and cannot give in to the wild desires to be everything and everyone and everything to everyone.

Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees.

(Socrates) said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born.

Unless you're completely exploded, there's always something to be grateful for.

In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries.

...chaos doesn't run the whole show.

Conquered people tend to be witty.

It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.

Retirement is an illusion. Not a reward but a mantrap. The bankrupt underside of success. A shortcut to death. Golf courses are too much like cemeteries.

The best and purest human beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred.

A person either creates or destroys. There is no neutrality.

"What do women want?" "They eat green salad and drink human blood."

When the striving ceases, there is life waiting as a gift.

There is much to be said for exotic marriages. If your husband is a bore, it takes years longer to discover.

One of the booby traps of freedom - which is bordered on all sides by isolation - is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life's banquet.

For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.

I love solitude, but I prize it most when plenty of company is available.

...there is no old age of the soul.

There is simply too much to think about.

Death deserves dignity.

It's goodbye to reality when love sets in.

Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.

Unfortunately for the betterment of mankind it is not always the fair-minded who are in the right.

It's no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite.

It's not up to me ... to make the world consistent.

...is the carbon molecule lined with thought?

But a man's character is his fate... and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

The writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he [or she] can at times come between the madly distracted and the distractions.

Love is the most potent cosmetic.

Myself is thus and so, and will continue thus and so. And why fight it? My balance comes from instability.

Let the enemies of life step down.

You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.

My face too blind, my mind too limited, my instincts too narrow. But this intensity, doesn't it mean anything?

The best argument is an undeniably good book.