Saul Bellow Quotes

149 Sourced Quotes

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.

Saul Bellow
A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him.

Saul Bellow
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.

Saul Bellow
It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything could be more exciting than the times themselves. What we read daily and view on the TV has thrust imagined forms into the shadow. We are staggeringly rich in facts, in things, and perhaps, like the nouveau riche of other ages, we want our wealth faithfully reproduced by the artist.

Saul Bellow
Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches.

Saul Bellow
If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

Saul Bellow
Once you had read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology.

Saul Bellow
There was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want! It happened every afternoon, and when I tried to suppress it it got even stronger.... It never said a thing except I want, I want, I want!

Saul Bellow
What is imposed on us by birth and environment is what we are called upon to overcome.

Saul Bellow
Libby…was what we used to call a 'suicide blonde' (dyed by her own hand).

Saul Bellow
Everything has to be tried out. Funnily enough, the same mind that takes in 'Dallas' or rap music is also accessible to Homer and Shakespeare.

Saul Bellow
Nobody asks you to love the whole world, only to be honest, ehrlich. Don't have a loud mouth. The more you love people the more they'll mix you up. A child loves, a person respects. Respect is better than love.

Saul Bellow
A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice.

Saul Bellow
The idea of making the century's great crime look dull is not banal. Politically, psychologically, the Germans had an idea of genius. The banality was only camouflage. What better way to get the curse out of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring, or trite?... Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience.

Saul Bellow
All human accomplishment has the 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
In here, the human bosom — mine, yours, everybody's — there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul. Now! Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?' Are you with me?

Saul Bellow
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
People reserve their best thinking for their professional specialties and, next in line, for serious matters confronting the alert citizen —economics, politics, the disposal of nuclear waste, etc. The day's work done, they want to be entertained.

Saul Bellow
In politics continental Europe was infantile — horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer.

Saul Bellow
The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop.

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

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

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

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

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

Saul Bellow