Top 100 Saul Bellow Quotes
#1. I like Hemingway and I like a lot Jewish writers (such as) Saul Bellow.
Wesley Clark
#2. I enjoy a misogynist so long as they have a wicked sense of humor and know, on some level, that they're pigs. This is why I enjoy Philip Roth but not Saul Bellow or James Salter.
Heidi Julavits
#3. Saul Bellow: Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything.
Christopher Hitchens
#4. You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.
David Denby
#5. I simply get up in the morning and go to work, and I read at night. Like Abe Lincoln. - Saul Bellow
Mason Currey
#6. Throughout my career I've struggled to encourage people to read my books on a more metaphorical level. I'm less attached to my settings than, for example, Saul Bellow. The setting of a novel for me is just a part of the technique. I choose it at the end.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#7. Once again it is demonstrated that people do not love their chains or their jailers,-and that the aspiration for a civilized life - that "universal eligibility to be noble," as Saul Bellow's Augie March so imperishably phrases it - is proper and common to all.
Christopher Hitchens
#8. Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.
Leslie Fiedler
#9. John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels?
Kingsley Amis
#10. The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.
Leslie Fiedler
#11. I had the idea in my twenties that a writer could immediately become the late Henry James. Henry James himself had to mature. Even Saul Bellow did.
Cynthia Ozick
#12. I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created.
Philip Schultz
#13. Saul Bellow once said, 'A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation' - which I think is true. I just started writing and made that jump from reader to writer and learned how hard it was, but also how much fun it was - losing myself in these imaginary worlds.
Stewart O'Nan
#14. Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.
Cynthia Ozick
#15. It's goodbye to reality when love sets in.
Saul Bellow
#16. It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality.
Saul Bellow
#17. Not that life should end is so terrible in itself, but that it should end with so many disappointments in the essential.
Saul Bellow
#18. It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn't have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal parts. Then it was in the line of human advance that Einhorn could do so much.
Saul Bellow
#19. Well, I need a job. Something that'll leave me the free time I want."
"I like the way you arrange your life. What do you intend to do with this free time?"
"I intend to use it." I didn't like the implication of this. Why should he need his time free and I be questioned?
Saul Bellow
#20. The main reason for rewriting is not to achieve a smooth surface, but to discover the inner truth of your characters.
Saul Bellow
#21. One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.
Saul Bellow
#22. Art is order, made out of the chaos of life.
Saul Bellow
#23. No, the truth must be something we understand at once, without an introduction or explanation, but so common and familiar that we don't always realize it's around us.
Saul Bellow
#24. Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there's the devil to pay.
Saul Bellow
#25. You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.
Saul Bellow
#26. The hour that burst the spirit's sleep...
Saul Bellow
#27. Death is going to take the boundaries away from us, that we should no more be persons. That's what death is about. When that is what life also wants to be about, how can you feel except rebellious?
Saul Bellow
#28. There is something funny about the human condition, and civilized intelligence makes fun of its own ideas.
Saul Bellow
#29. All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!
Saul Bellow
#30. To rip off a piece of lover's temper was a pleasure in her deepest vein of enjoyment.
Saul Bellow
#31. Live or die, but don't poison everything.
Saul Bellow
#32. Nobody should be a mystery intentionally. Unintentionally is mysterious enough.
Saul Bellow
#33. It's not up to me ... to make the world consistent.
Saul Bellow
#34. 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.
Saul Bellow
#35. Keep out of this, please, will you, Mildred? A child isn't a toy." "Oh," she said, "they grow up. Time does it more than fathers and mothers. The parents take too much credit.
Saul Bellow
#36. And what about all the good I have in my heart - does it mean anything?
Saul Bellow
#37. People forget how sensational the things are that they do. They don't see it on themselves. It blends into the background of their daily life.
Saul Bellow
#38. Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.
Saul Bellow
#39. But enough of that
here I am. Hineni! How marvelously beautiful it is today. He stopped in the overgrown yard, shut his eyes in the sun, against flashes of crimson, and drew in the odors of catalpa-bells, soil, honeysuckle, wild onions, and herbs.
Saul Bellow
#40. Mimi didn't care about secrecy. She led a proclaimed life, and once she got talking she held back nothing.
Saul Bellow
#41. He yelled, Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life.
Saul Bellow
#42. We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans
convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.
Saul Bellow
#43. But maybe time was invented so that misery might have an end. So that it shouldn't last forever? There may be something in this. And bliss, just the opposite, is eternal? There is no time in bliss. All the clocks were thrown out of heaven.
Saul Bellow
#44. A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.
Saul Bellow
#45. It's no small matter to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think - to say it in your own words, without compromise.
Saul Bellow
#46. But Mimi- her tenderness didn't have an easy visibility. You wondered what it would be, and after what terrible manifestations it would appear.
Saul Bellow
#47. He had come into a view of mutability, and I too could see that one is only ostensibly born to remain in specified limits.
Saul Bellow
#48. In the depths of a man's being there was something that responded with a quack to such perfume. Quack!
Saul Bellow
#49. Yes, these business people have great energy. There's a question as to what's burned to produce it and what things we can and can't burn.
Saul Bellow
#50. It was all there. Only he was not through with love and hate elsewhere.
Saul Bellow
#51. No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.
Saul Bellow
#52. Shall I run back into the desert ... and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven't had enough desert yet.
Saul Bellow
#53. Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves.
Saul Bellow
#54. Again! It was like the question asked by Tennyson about the flower in the crannied wall. That is, to answer it might involve the history of the universe.
Saul Bellow
#55. Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.
Saul Bellow
#56. Some big insect flew in and began walking on the table. I don't know what insect it was, but it was brown, shining, and rich in structures. In the city the big universal chain of insects gets thin, but where there's a leaf or two it'll be represented.
Saul Bellow
#57. A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow
#58. The two real problems in life are boredom and death.
Saul Bellow
#59. How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants the opinion of a group?
Saul Bellow
#60. I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America.
Saul Bellow
#61. I don't know exactly how it's done. I let it alone a good deal.
Saul Bellow
#62. Maybe America didn't need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we.
Saul Bellow
#63. I don't actually take much stock in the collapsing culture bit. I'm beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul.
Saul Bellow
#64. A man may say, "From now on I'm going to speak the truth." But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking.
Saul Bellow
#65. From Euclid to Newton there were straight lines. The modern age analyzes the wavers.
Saul Bellow
#66. For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.
Saul Bellow
#67. That's so often what it is with machinery: be somewhat in doubt and it carries the decision.
Saul Bellow
#68. I mean you have been disappointed in love, but don't you know how many things there are to be disappointed in besides love? You are lucky to be still disappointed in love. Later it may be even more terrible.
Saul Bellow
#69. I would never make a lion, I knew that; but I might pick up a small gain here and there in the attempt.
Saul Bellow
#70. The sand swallows burst out of their scupper holes in the bluffs and out over the transparent drown of the water, back again to the white, to the brown, to the black, from moving to stock-still sand waves and water-worked woods and roots that hugged and twisted in the sun.
Saul Bellow
#71. Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent?
Saul Bellow
#72. Unfortunately for the betterment of mankind it is not always the fair-minded who are in the right.
Saul Bellow
#73. Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees.
Saul Bellow
#74. Is the carbon molecule lined with thought?
Saul Bellow
#75. Oh yes, I got up on my hindlegs like an orator and sounded off to everyone.
Saul Bellow
#76. Your authority and my degeneracy are one in the same.
Saul Bellow
#77. What was the matter that pureness of feeling couldn't be kept up? I see I met those writers in the big book of utopias at a peculiar time. In those utopias, set up by hopes and art, how could you overlook the part of nature or be sure you could keep the feelings up?
Saul Bellow
#78. There's the big advantage of backwardness. By the time the latest ideas reach Chicago, they're worn thin and easy to see through. You don't have to bother with them and it saves lots of trouble.
Saul Bellow
#79. 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.
Saul Bellow
#80. When a man's breast feels like a cage from which all the dark birds have flown - he is free, he is light. And he longs to have his vultures back again. He wants his customary struggles, his nameless, empty works, his anger, his afflictions and his sins.
Saul Bellow
#81. Depressives cannot surrender childhood
not even the pains of childhood.
Saul Bellow
#82. I immersed myself in The Periodic Table gladly and gratefully. There is nothing superfluous here, everything this book contains is essential. It is wonderful pure, and beautifully translated ... I was deeply impressed.
Saul Bellow
#83. I would like to explain that I consider prayer above all an act of gratitude for existence.
Saul Bellow
#84. These were his friends of the business community; a man in business had to have such, and he visited and entertained but neither touched nor was touched, ever.
Saul Bellow
#86. An era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age.
Saul Bellow
#87. Even if I am not the honestest type in the world I don't want to lie more than is average.
Saul Bellow
#89. There's the most extraordinary, unheard of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it...the agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way.
Saul Bellow
#90. Did I say that the world had never had better color? I left something out of account, a limping, crippled consideration which seems to lose ground as you reach beauty and Orizaba flowers, but soon you find it has preceded you.
Saul Bellow
#91. Death discredits. Survival is the whole success. The voice of the dead goes away. There isn't any memory. The power that's established fills the earth and destiny is whatever survives, so whatever is is right.
Saul Bellow
#92. Even worse is the discovery that one has been living out certain greeting-card sentiments, with ribbons of middle-class virtue tied in a bow around one's heart.
Saul Bellow
#93. Everybody wants to have intimate conversations, but the smart fellows don't give out, only the fools. The smart fellows talk intimately about the fools, and examine them all over and give them advice.
Saul Bellow
#94. But then why shouldn't he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living - perhaps more; and besides, his letters to the living were increasingly mental, and anyway, to the Unconscious, what was death? Dreams did not recognize it.
Saul Bellow
#95. People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
Saul Bellow
#96. Sometimes I wonder," I said, "if people who are going to tell the truth shouldn't make sure first that they can defend themselves.
Saul Bellow
#97. As the wicked flee when none pursueth, so does the middle-class wrestle when none contendeth. They cried out for freedom, it came down on them in a flood. Nothing remains but a few floating timbers of psychotherapy.
Saul Bellow
#98. Human character is smaller now, people don't have durable passions; they've replaced passions with excitement.
Saul Bellow
#99. The only real distinction at this dangerous moment in human history and cosmic development has nothing to do with medals and ribbons. Not to fall asleep is distinguished. Everything else is mere popcorn.
Saul Bellow
#100. Everyone was like the faces on a playing card, upside down either way.
Saul Bellow
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