Saul Bellow Quotes
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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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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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Is our species crazy? Plenty of evidence.
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...there is no old age of the soul.
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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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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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The two real problems in life are boredom and death.
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Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees.
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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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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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Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.
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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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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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Our society, like decadent Rome, has turned into an amusement society, with writers chief among the court jesters
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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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Human character is smaller now, people don't have durable passions; they've replaced passions with excitement.
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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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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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A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.
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Art is order, made out of the chaos of life.
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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.