Saul Bellow - American Quotes

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Reading Decline of the West I learned that in Spengler's view ours was a Faustian civilization and that we, the Jews, were Magians, the survivors and representatives of an earlier type, totally incapable of comprehending the Faustian spirit that had created the great civilization of the West. … What Magians were to Faustians, Faustians might very well be to Americans.

Saul Bellow
A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become.

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
We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans — convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.

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
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
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
I think that New York is not the cultural center of America, but the business and administrative center of American culture.

Saul Bellow