Saul Bellow Quotations

A man is only as good as what he loves.

Happiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.

She was what we used to call a suicide blonde - dyed by her own hand.

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

When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.

Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.

In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.

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

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.

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

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

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries.

People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

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.

No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side.

If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.

Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

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.

There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever... money, for instance, or war.

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next.

California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that.

A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

She was what we used to call a suicide blond - dyed by her own hand.

There is something terribly nervous-making about a modern existence. For one thing, it's all the thinking we have to do and all the judgments we have to make. It's the price of freedom: make the judgments, make the mental calls,

reality comes from giving an account of yourself. (Augie March)

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

Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance.

One way or another the no doubt mad idea entered my mind that my own actions had historic importance and this fantasy (?) made it appear that people who harmed me were interfering with an important experiment.

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.

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. (Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)

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

Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent?

Art -- the fresh feeling, new harmony, the transforming magic which by means of myth brings back the scattered distracted soul from its modern chaos -- art, not politics, is the remedy.

For God's sake,' the dog is saying, 'open the universe a little more!

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

Unfortunately for the betterment of mankind it is not always the fair-minded who are in the right.

It would not be practical for her to hate herself. Luckily, God sends a substitute, a husband.

Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself out of life for purposes of love--or what good is it?

Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was "broken.

The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business.

Great pressure is brought to bear to make us undervalue ourselves. On the other hand, civilization teaches that each of us is an inestimable prize. There are, then, these two preparations: one for life and the other for death. Therefore we value and are ashamed to value ourselves.

De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse.

Art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential.

How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants the opinion of a group?

A plan relieves you of the torment of choice.

The more realistic you are the more you threaten the grounds of your own art.

The writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he [or she] can at times come between the madly distracted and the distractions.

The best argument is an undeniably good book.

Art is order, made out of the chaos of life.

O Lord! he concluded, forgive all these trespasses. Lead me not into Penn Station.

I am deeply moved when I write. I get turned on by it. I've never used any drugs for stimulation. I don't use words loosely. When I'm working and the right word comes, there is an answering resonance within me. There is also a hardness of intention that goes with it. There is no idleness in it.

Humankind struggles with collective powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul.

I'm afraid there's nothing we can do about the journalists; we can only hope that they will die off as the deerflies do towards the end of August.

Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.

I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.

I immersed myself in The Periodic Table gladly and gratefully. There is nothing superfluous here, everything this book contains is essential. It is wonderful pure, and beautifully translated...I was deeply impressed.

One must bear in mind the odd angle or slant that the rays of love have to take in order to reach a heart like mine.

Those who have a why to live for can bear almost any how. The necessary premise is that a person is somehow more than his or her "characteristics," all the emotions, strivings, tastes, and constructions which it pleases us to call "My Life." We have grounds to hope that a Life is something more than a cloud of particles, mere facticity. Go through what is comprehensible and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light.

Conquered people tend to be witty.

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?

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.

Myself is thus and so, and will continue thus and so. And why fight it? My balance comes from instability.

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.

The hour that burst the spirit's sleep...

Hapiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.

I want to tell you, don't marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it's adultery.

The physical body is an agent of the spirit and its mirror. It is an engine and a reflection of the spirit. It is the spirit's ingenious memorandum to itself and the spirit sees itself in my body, just as I see my own face in a looking glass. My nerves reflect this. The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.

The body, she says, is subject to the force of gravity. But the soul is ruled by levity, pure.

When I didn't argue he was satisfied he had persuaded me, and was not the first to make that mistake.

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.

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

Live or die but don't poison everything.

It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.

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.

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.

At moments I dislike having a face, a nose, lips, because he has them.

I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally.

I am something of a crank about sleep, for if I get seven and a quarter hours instead of eight I feel afflicted and drag myself around, although there's nothing really wrong with me. It's just another idea. That's how it is with my ideas; they seem to get strong while I weaken.

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.

I don't like to write from a flat, cold position. You must like what you're doing very much or like the people -- either like them or hate them. You can't be indifferent.

Do we always, always to the point of misery, do a thing?

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.

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. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

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

Strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.

I'm glad I haven't lived in vain.

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!

If I had a child of school age, I would send him to one of the Waldorf Schools.

Towards the end of your life you have something like a pain schedule to fill out—a long schedule like a federal document, only it's your pain schedule. Endless categories. First, physical causes—like arthritis, gallstones, menstrual cramps. New category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist? If love cuts them up so much....

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

Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn't know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you're picking up the pieces -- down to the last glassy splinter.

We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.