Saul Bellow Quotes
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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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It's no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite.
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Facts always are sensational.
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Strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.
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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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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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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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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 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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But there are things you can't consult anybody about.
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There is much to be said for exotic marriages. If your husband is a bore, it takes years longer to discover.
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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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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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Hapiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.
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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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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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... a fellow can't predict what he will pick up in the form of influence.
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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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I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side.
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Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.
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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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You have, like the external world, your own phenomena inside.
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It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything could be more exciting than the times themselves. What we read daily and view on the TV has thrust imagined forms into the shadow. We are staggeringly rich in facts, in things, and perhaps, like the nouveau riche of other ages, we want our wealth faithfully reproduced by the artist.
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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?