Saul Bellow Quotes
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The two real problems in life are boredom and death.
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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.
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A millennial belief in a Holy God may have the effect of deepening the soul, but it is also obviously archaic, and modern influences would presently bring me up to date and reveal how antiquated my origins were. To turn away from those origins, however, has always seemed to me an utter impossibility. It would be a treason to my first consciousness to un-Jew myself.
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Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.
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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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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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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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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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The hour that burst the spirit's sleep.
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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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...there is no old age of the soul.
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Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees.
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She's very pretty but she's honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won't spread.
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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.
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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 labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally.
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But she's a nut, and nuts win.
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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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A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.
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In here, the human bosom -- mine, yours, everybody's -- there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul. Now! Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?' Are you with me?
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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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Fun comes hard - like, alas, its prarens, pleasure and happiness, whom we have to pursue.
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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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As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting - the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.