Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools talk because they have to say
something.
– Saul Bellow
A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto
death.
– Saul Bellow
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
– 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
Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That’s the present moment. The
past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real – the
here-and-now. Seize the day.
– Saul Bellow
A man is only as good as what he loves.
– Saul Bellow
You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
– Saul Bellow
Happiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.
– Saul Bellow
Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
– Saul Bellow
A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out.
– Saul Bellow
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
People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
– Saul Bellow
When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
– Saul Bellow
One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.
– Saul Bellow
I’m glad I haven’t lived in vain.
– Saul Bellow
Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity.
– Saul Bellow
Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.
– Saul Bellow
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
There is 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
Live or die but don’t poison everything.
– Saul Bellow
Any artist should be grateful for a naïve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason
elaborately.
– 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
In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the
pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too.
– Saul Bellow
One of the booby traps of freedom – which is bordered on all sides by isolation – is that we
think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life’s
banquet.
– Saul Bellow
We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans – convinced that we must help and hasten
their evolution.
– Saul Bellow
What is imposed on us by birth and environment is what we are called upon to overcome.
– 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.
– Saul Bellow
She was what we used to call a suicide blonde – dyed by her own hand.
– 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.
– Saul Bellow
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.
– Saul Bellow
A writer is a reader moved to emulation.
– Saul Bellow
The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which
confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process
as a not-entirely-human creature.
– Saul Bellow
You have to fight for your life. That’s the chief condition on which you hold it.
– Saul Bellow
I am a true adorer of life, and if I can’t reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss
somewhere lower down. Those who understand will require no further explanation.
– Saul Bellow
In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries.
– Saul Bellow
Boredom is the shriek of unused capacities.
– Saul Bellow
Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to
command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is
seasoned with terror and with death.
– 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
California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn’t really need. You can quote
me on that.
– Saul Bellow
Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.
– Saul Bellow
A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.
– 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
We mustn’t forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of
intellectuals.
– Saul Bellow
You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first
half.
– Saul Bellow
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.
– Saul Bellow
Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.
– Saul Bellow
I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A
stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has
something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.
– Saul Bellow
All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he’s a writer. It’s an aphrodisiac.
– Saul Bellow
What is art but a way of seeing?
– Saul Bellow
A millennial belief in a Holy God may have the effect of deepening the soul, but it is also
obviously archaic, and modern influences would presently bring me up to date and reveal how
antiquated my origins were. To turn away from those origins, however, has always seemed to
me an utter impossibility. It would be a treason to my first consciousness to un-Jew myself.
– Saul Bellow
I love solitude but I prize it most when company is available.
– Saul Bellow
As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was
worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to
poetry, philosophy, painting – the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind
when the age of science began.
– Saul Bellow
I am a phoenix who runs after arsonists.
– 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
Conquered people tend to be witty.
– Saul Bellow
In the history of the world many souls have been, are, and will be, and with a little reflection
this is marvelous and not depressing. Many jerks are made gloomy about it, for they think
quantity buries them alive. That’s just crazy. Numbers are very dangerous, but the main thing
about them is that they humble your pride. And that’s good.
– Saul Bellow
Unexpected intrusions of beauty. That is what life is.
– 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
I’ve discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on
his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, “To hell with you.”
– Saul Bellow
There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on forever… money, for
instance, or war.
– Saul Bellow