Saul Bellow Quotes
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Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.
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When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
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I don't know exactly how it's done. I let it alone a good deal.
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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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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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... an era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age.
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We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.
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In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While in the parlors of indignation the right-thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil. (p. 51)
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People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.
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California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that.
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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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What Homo sapien imagines, he may slowly convert himself to.
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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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One of the booby traps of freedom - which is bordered on all sides by isolation - is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life's banquet.
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I love solitude, but I prize it most when plenty of company is available.
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He believed that he must, that he could and would recover the good things, the happy things, the easy tranquil things of life. He had made mistakes, but he could overlook these. He had been a fool, but that could be forgiven. The time wasted--must be relinquished. What else could one do about it? Things were too complex, but they might be reduced to simplicity again. Recovery was possible.
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Excuse me ... but I reject your definitions of me.
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A plan relieves you of the torment of choice.
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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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The two real problems in life are boredom and death.
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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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I don't like to write from a flat, cold position. You must like what you're doing very much or like the people -- either like them or hate them. You can't be indifferent.
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The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it — that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.
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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.