Saul Bellow Quotes
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The more realistic you are the more you threaten the grounds of your own art.
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A person either creates or destroys. There is no neutrality.
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O Lord! he concluded, forgive all these trespasses. Lead me not into Penn Station.
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Love is the most potent cosmetic.
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Humankind struggles with collective powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul.
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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.
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Conquered people tend to be witty.
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To tell the truth I never had it so good. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy.
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...is the carbon molecule lined with thought?
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I want to tell you, don't marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it's adultery.
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Art -- the fresh feeling, new harmony, the transforming magic which by means of myth brings back the scattered distracted soul from its modern chaos -- art, not politics, is the remedy.
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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.
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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.
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...I am much better now at ambiguities.
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Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was "broken.
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Erotic practices have become diversified. Sex used to be a single-crop farming, like cotton or wheat; now people raise all kinds of things.
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An exchange occurs between man and woman. Love and thought complete each other in the human pair, and something like an exchange of souls takes place, according to the divine plan.
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She was what we used to call a suicide blonde - dyed by her own hand.
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You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.
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The sand swallows burst out of their scupper holes in the bluffs and out over the transparent drown of the water, back again to the white, to the brown, to the black, from moving to stock-still sand waves and water-worked woods and roots that hugged and twisted in the sun.
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The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business.
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The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist? The keen old prof replied, And who is asking?
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I am deeply moved when I write. I get turned on by it. I've never used any drugs for stimulation. I don't use words loosely. When I'm working and the right word comes, there is an answering resonance within me. There is also a hardness of intention that goes with it. There is no idleness in it.
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I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.