Saul Bellow Quotes
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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.
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One way or another the no doubt mad idea entered my mind that my own actions had historic importance and this fantasy (?) made it appear that people who harmed me were interfering with an important experiment.
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The secret motive of the absent-minded is to be innocent while guilty. Absent-mindedness is spurious innocence.
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The main reason for rewriting is not to achieve a smooth surface, but to discover the inner truth of your characters.
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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.
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It's no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite.
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All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!
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I mean you have been disappointed in love, but don't you know how many things there are to be disappointed in besides love? You are lucky to be still disappointed in love. Later it may be even more terrible.
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Facts always are sensational.
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It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality.
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Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.
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I am more stupid about some things than others; not equally stupid in all directions; I am not a well-rounded person.
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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?
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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.
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... a fellow can't predict what he will pick up in the form of influence.
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You have, like the external world, your own phenomena inside.
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I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side.
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Is our species crazy? Plenty of evidence.
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I have, perhaps, a slave-like constitution which is too easily restrained by bonds; it then becomes rebellious and bursts out in a comic revolution.
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Nobody asks you to love the whole world, only to be honest, ehrlich. Don't have a loud mouth. The more you love people the more they'll mix you up. A child loves, a person respects. Respect is better than love.
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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.
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Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself out of life for purposes of love--or what good is it?
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I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.
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The two real problems in life are boredom and death.