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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.
Saul Bellow -
The fact that there are so many weak, poor and boring stories and novels written and published in America has been ascribed by our rebels to the horrible squareness of our institutions, the idiocy of power, the debasement of sexual instincts, and the failure of writers to be alienated enough. The poems and novels of these same rebellious spirits, and their theoretical statements, are grimy and gritty and very boring too, besides being nonsensical, and it is evident by now that polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art either.
Saul Bellow
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Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.
Saul Bellow -
She's very pretty but she's honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won't spread.
Saul Bellow -
It's no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite.
Saul Bellow -
For God's sake,' the dog is saying, 'open the universe a little more!
Saul Bellow -
Brother raises a hand against brother and son against father (how terrible!) and the father also against son. And moreover it is a continuity-matter, for if the father did not strike the son, they would not be alike. It is done to perpetuate similarity. Oh, Henderson, man cannot keep still under the blows.... A hit B? B hit C?--we have not enough alphabet to cover the condition. A brave man will try to make the evil stop with him. He shall keep the blow. No man shall get it from him, and that is a sublime ambition.
Saul Bellow -
You have, like the external world, your own phenomena inside.
Saul Bellow
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Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.
Saul Bellow -
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.
Saul Bellow -
Also, he was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage; it is harder to find out how he feels.
Saul Bellow -
There is much to be said for exotic marriages. If your husband is a bore, it takes years longer to discover.
Saul Bellow -
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.
Saul Bellow -
But there are things you can't consult anybody about.
Saul Bellow
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Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent?
Saul Bellow -
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.
Saul Bellow -
One must bear in mind the odd angle or slant that the rays of love have to take in order to reach a heart like mine.
Saul Bellow -
The only truly intersting side of the matter was the intimate design of the injury, the fact that it was so penetrating, custom-made exactly to your measure. It's fascinating that hatred should be so personal as to be almost loving. The knife and the wound aching for each other.
Saul Bellow -
Do we always, always to the point of misery, do a thing?
Saul Bellow -
But she's a nut, and nuts win.
Saul Bellow
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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.
Saul Bellow -
In politics continental Europe was infantile - horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer.
Saul Bellow -
The secret motive of the absent-minded is to be innocent while guilty. Absent-mindedness is spurious innocence.
Saul Bellow -
When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
Saul Bellow