Saul Bellow Quotes (42 Quotes)

In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries.

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

When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.

On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was almost motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay about the doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores. And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every age, of every genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally. The sidewalks were wider than any causeway the street itself was immense, and it quaked and gleamed and it seemed ... to throb at the last limit of endurance.

Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it - they should, because they put it all in beforehand.

People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

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

If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.

A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

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

I'm glad I haven't lived in vain.

There was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want It happened every afternoon, and when I tried to suppress it it got even stronger.

Hapiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.

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.

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that.

A man is only as good as what he loves.

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

The fact that there are so many weak, poor and boring stories and novels written and published in America has been ascribed by our rebels to the horrible squareness of our institutions, the idiocy of power, the debasement of sexual instincts, and the failure of writers to be alienated enough. The poems and novels of these same rebellious spirits, and their theoretical statements, are grimy and gritty and very boring too, besides being nonsensical, and it is evident by now that polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art either.

There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever... money, for instance, or war.

Conquered people tend to be witty.

What is art but a way of seeing?

A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out.

Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.

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.

I'm an American, Chicago born.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.

I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we are all put together. We are so proud of our autonomy that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others. One of the booby traps of freedomwhich is bordered on all sides by isolationis that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at lifes banquet.

I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side.

The great enemy of progressive ideals is not the establishment but the limitless dullness of those who take them up.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next.

Take our politicians they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize.

There is something terribly nervous-making about a modern existence. For one thing, it's all the thinking we have to do and all the judgments we have to make. It's the price of freedom make the judgments, make the mental calls,