Saul Bellow Quotes
-
I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.
-
I am more stupid about some things than others; not equally stupid in all directions; I am not a well-rounded person.
-
All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
-
Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.
-
I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.
-
For God's sake,' the dog is saying, 'open the universe a little more!
-
We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it - the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.
-
Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come 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.
-
You have, like the external world, your own phenomena inside.
-
Fun comes hard - like, alas, its prarens, pleasure and happiness, whom we have to pursue.
-
Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees.
-
The secret motive of the absent-minded is to be innocent while guilty. Absent-mindedness is spurious innocence.
-
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.
-
Strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.
-
There is much to be said for exotic marriages. If your husband is a bore, it takes years longer to discover.
-
But there are things you can't consult anybody about.
-
... a fellow can't predict what he will pick up in the form of influence.
-
The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas which frequently deny its very existence, and which indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether.
-
Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent?
-
Do we always, always to the point of misery, do a thing?
-
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.
-
She's very pretty but she's honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won't spread.
-
But she's a nut, and nuts win.
-
Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can't open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated.