Saul Bellow Quotes

I have, perhaps, a slave-like constitution which is too easily restrained by bonds; it then becomes rebellious and bursts out in a comic revolution.

You're all alone when you're a writer. Sometimes you just feel you need a humanity bath. Even a ride on the subway will do that. But it's much more interesting to talk about books. After all, that's what life used to be for writers: they talk books, politics, history, America. Nothing has replaced that.

I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.

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.

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.

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.

In the history of the world many souls have been, are, and will be, and with a little reflection this is marvelous and not depressing. Many jerks are made gloomy about it, for they think quantity buries them alive. That's just crazy. Numbers are very dangerous, but the main thing about them is that they humble your pride. And that's good.

Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can't open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated.

A man is only as good as what he loves.

The main reason for rewriting is not to achieve a smooth surface, but to discover the inner truth of your characters.

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.

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

To tell the truth I never had it so good. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy.

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.'

California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that.

People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.

Death is the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all.

The two real problems in life are boredom and death.

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.

There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. But the over-examined life makes you wish you were dead. Given the alternative, I'd rather be living.

It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality.

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.

...America didn't have to fight scarcity and we all felt guilty before people who still had to struggle for bread and freedom in the old way ... We weren't starving, we weren't bugged by the police, locked up in madhouses for our ideas, arrested, deported, slave laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and nights of terror. With our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind. But instead we sleep. Just sleep and sleep, and eat and play and fuss and sleep again.

Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.

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)

(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.

Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself out of life for purposes of love--or what good is it?

When the striving ceases, there is life waiting as a gift.

I would like to explain that I consider prayer above all an act of gratitude for existence.

Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.

But she's a nut, and nuts win.

I am something of a crank about sleep, for if I get seven and a quarter hours instead of eight I feel afflicted and drag myself around, although there's nothing really wrong with me. It's just another idea. That's how it is with my ideas; they seem to get strong while I weaken.

The fact that there are so many weak, poor and boring stories and novels written and published in America has been ascribed by our rebels to the horrible squareness of our institutions, the idiocy of power, the debasement of sexual instincts, and the failure of writers to be alienated enough. The poems and novels of these same rebellious spirits, and their theoretical statements, are grimy and gritty and very boring too, besides being nonsensical, and it is evident by now that polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art either.

Strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.

The best and purest human beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

"What do women want?" "They eat green salad and drink human blood."

I am deeply moved when I write. I get turned on by it. I've never used any drugs for stimulation. I don't use words loosely. When I'm working and the right word comes, there is an answering resonance within me. There is also a hardness of intention that goes with it. There is no idleness in it.

A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.

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.

She's very pretty but she's honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won't spread.

Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.

I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.

Unless you're completely exploded, there's always something to be grateful for.

A man must have limits and cannot give in to the wild desires to be everything and everyone and everything to everyone.

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.