Saul Bellow Quotes
I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.
Quotes to Explore
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I drove long distances like the 24 hours of Le Mans for years. But even this racing is now over. I retired.
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Lately, I've been doing a lot of tuning in and impatiently tuning out. As a longtime fan of talk radio, I don't think this bodes well for the long-term broad appeal of the medium.
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As I'm writing, certain things become clear to me and certain things begin to feel right and make sense. The pieces start to fall into place.
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Sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I'm writing about things from eight years ago-they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way.
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Revision is the heart of writing. Every page I do is done over seven or eight times.
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Write every day; never give up; it's supposed to be difficult; try to find some pleasure and reward in the act of writing, because you can't look for praise from editors, readers, or critics. In other words, tips that are much easier to give than to take.
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When I was writing 'The Windup Girl' and 'Ship Breaker,' I was writing those simultaneously, so I was an unpublished writer, not really having that full sense that these books would go out in the world, that they would be successful, that there would be an audience and that there would be fans of those stories.
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Very often, writing a song is a process that happens to me rather than one that I instigate. I feel a song coming on and, like a sneeze; I wait for it until it comes.
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I think books and movies are going to go a long way together in the future. I think we writers are very important material for directors.
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We live too long for one marriage.
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My brain is so anxiety-prone, like a pinball machine. If I don't get up in the morning and focus my thinking, my breathing, and my being for about 12 minutes, I'm just a screwball all day long.
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When I'm writing books, something weird happens; and the result is the books contain a large amount of what you could call 'supernaturalism.' As a writer, I find I need that to explain the world I'm writing about.
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I thought writing about somebody current would be a little closer to what I'm used to doing.
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There aren't a lot of 'Aha!' moments in writing.
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It's difficult to make your clients understand that there are certain days that the market will go up or down 2%, and it's basically driven by algorithms talking to algorithms. There's no real rhyme or reason for that. So it's difficult. We just try to preach long-term investing and staying the course.
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Because it started as an offshoot of al Qaeda in Iraq, ISIL has long been subject to U.N. sanctions, and all countries have a legal obligation to freeze its assets and prohibit its business dealings. But countries around the world need to do more to make these sanctions work.
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When we saw our plane on TV as breaking news, it was the most surreal experience. A lot of the women were crying. There was a gentleman who was writing in his journal and crying. Seeing that isn't easy.
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Storytelling is storytelling. Good stories need compelling characters and interesting conflicts. That's the bottom line no matter what medium you're writing for.
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You can't know your real mind as long as you deceive yourself.
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People often ask me why I don't take up more heroine-oriented roles. My question is, 'Where are these roles?' I really appreciate actresses who sign only films with meaty roles. However, there aren't too many of them. The industry is simply male-dominated.
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I believe that nothing is more important to our ability to effectively address our present than understanding the lessons learned from those who have come before us.
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Intermarriage is not a calamity but an opportunity for both a Jewish and non-Jewish partner to learn.
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I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.
