Saul Bellow Quotes
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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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Socrates said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born.
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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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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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There is 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 novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
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Unfortunately for the betterment of mankind it is not always the fair-minded who are in the right.
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We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next.
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I love solitude, but I prize it most when plenty of company is available.
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When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
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Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.
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Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep.
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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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A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.
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It's not up to me ... to make the world consistent.
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Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.
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Great pressure is brought to bear to make us undervalue ourselves. On the other hand, civilization teaches that each of us is an inestimable prize. There are, then, these two preparations: one for life and the other for death. Therefore we value and are ashamed to value ourselves.
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And I said to myself that unless you conceive Death to be a violent guerrilla and kidnaper who snatches those you love, and if you are not cowardly and cannot submit to such terrorism as civilized people now do in every department of life, you must pursue and inquire and explore every possibility and seek everywhere and try everything.
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It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.
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... an era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age.
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With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything.
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The modern reader (or viewer, or listener: let's include everybody) is perilously overloaded. His attention is, to use the latest lingo,'targeted' by powerful forces? Our consciousness is a staging area, a field of operations for all kinds of enterprises, which make free use of it.
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The physical body is an agent of the spirit and its mirror. It is an engine and a reflection of the spirit. It is the spirit's ingenious memorandum to itself and the spirit sees itself in my body, just as I see my own face in a looking glass. My nerves reflect this. The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.
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No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.