Saul Bellow
72 quotes
Biography
Saul Bellow was a Canadian-American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Medal of Arts.
"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write."
"People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned."
"What is art but a way of seeing?"
"Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is."
"It's usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart."
"A man is only as good as what he loves."
"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..."
"Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone."
"There is no limit to the amount of intelligence invested in ignorance when the need for illusion runs deep."
"He didn't ask "Where will you spend eternity?"as religious the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, "With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?"
"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."
"Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love."
"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."
"Conquered people tend to be witty."
"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!"
"We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it — the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it."
"We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals."
"I think that New York is not the cultural center of America, but the business and administrative center of American culture."
"Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door."
"Once you had read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology."
"I never yet touched a fig leaf that didn't turn into a price tag."
"Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything."
"No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection."
"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."
"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."