Saul Bellow Quotes
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In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too
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Excuse me ... but I reject your definitions of me.
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Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.
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It is a joy to be choked with thought.
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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 two real problems in life are boredom and death.
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The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business.
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The first undressing of two lovers is a most special event.
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If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.
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A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
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I am an American – Chicago born.
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It seems, after all that there are no nonpeculiar people.
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With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.
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You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.
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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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And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.
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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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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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We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects, but endless fire.
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It's goodbye to reality when love sets in.
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Death deserves dignity.
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If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
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The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature. (Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)
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The dream of man's heart ... is that life may complete in significant pattern.