Saul Bellow Quotes
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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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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.
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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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Fun comes hard - like, alas, its prarens, pleasure and happiness, whom we have to pursue.
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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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Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.
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Is our species crazy? Plenty of evidence.
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But there are things you can't consult anybody about.
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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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All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
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Myself is thus and so, and will continue thus and so. And why fight it? My balance comes from instability.
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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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There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.
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Human character is smaller now, people don't have durable passions; they've replaced passions with excitement.
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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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Art is order, made out of the chaos of life.
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But she's a nut, and nuts win.
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Our society, like decadent Rome, has turned into an amusement society, with writers chief among the court jesters
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I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.
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There was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want! It happened every afternoon, and when I tried to suppress it it got even stronger.
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I've discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.'
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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.
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We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next.
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The two real problems in life are boredom and death.