Saul Bellow Quotes

149 Sourced Quotes

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

Saul Bellow
Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it. They should, because they put it all in beforehand. It's like an Easter Egg hunt.

Saul Bellow
There are evils, as someone has pointed out, that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever — money, for instance, or war.

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

Saul Bellow
You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

Saul Bellow
I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

Saul Bellow
I pretended not to understand. One of life's hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow. I think I succeeded, thought Herzog.

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

Saul Bellow
Much of junk culture has a core of crisis — shoot-outs, conflagrations, bodies weltering in blood, naked embracers or rapist-stranglers. The sounds of junk culture are heard over a ground bass of extremism. Our entertainments swarm with specters of world crisis. Nothing moderate can have any claim to our attention.

Saul Bellow
Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole.

Saul Bellow
Our media make crisis chatter out of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing — a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the U. N., the financial collapse of New York. We can't avoid being politicized (a word as murky as the condition which it describes) because it is necessary after all to know what is going on. Worse yet, what is going on will not let us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations, the insidious platitudes of the media (tormenting because the underlying realities are so large and so terrible), can be screened out. The study of literature itself is heavily "politicized."

Saul Bellow
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.

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

Saul Bellow
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
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.

Saul Bellow
We are free to withdraw (to withdraw our minds where we cannot withdraw our bodies) from situations in which our humanity or lack of it is defined for us.

Saul Bellow
The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist? The keen old prof replied, And who is asking?

Saul Bellow
Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity.

Saul Bellow
I don't know exactly how it's done. I let it alone a good deal.

Saul Bellow
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.

Saul Bellow
You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.

Saul Bellow
The book of the world, so richly studied by autodidacts, is being closed by the learned, who are raising walls of opinions to shut the world out.

Saul Bellow
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.

Saul Bellow
One's language is a spiritual location. It houses your soul. If you were born in America all essential communication, your deepest conversations with yourself, will be in English. … Your English is the principal instrument of your humanity.

Saul Bellow
Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be glad to read him.

Saul Bellow
As a scholar [Allan Bloom] intends to enlighten us, and as a writer he has learned from Aristophanes and other models that enlightenment should also be enjoyable. To me, this is not the book of a professor, but that of a thinker who is willing to take the risks more frequently taken by writers. It is risky in a book of ideas to speak in one's own voice, but it reminds us that the sources of the truest truths are inevitably profoundly personal. … Academics, even those describing themselves as existentialists, very seldom offer themselves publicly and frankly as individuals, as persons.

Saul Bellow
Boredom…is also the shriek of unused capacities, the doom of serving no great end or design, or contributing to no master force.

Saul Bellow
Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees.

Saul Bellow
You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.

Saul Bellow