Saul Bellow > Quotes

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

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

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“A man is only as good as what he loves.”
― Saul Bellow

“Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.”
― Saul Bellow

“When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice”
― Saul Bellow

“Live or die but don't poison everything.”
― Saul Bellow

“A writer is a reader moved to emulation.”
― Saul Bellow

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

“We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects, but endless fire.”
― Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. That is what life is.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

“I am a phoenix who runs after arsonists.”
― Saul Bellow

“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…”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“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

“Myself is thus and so, and will continue thus and so. And why fight it? My balance comes from instability.”
― Saul Bellow

“I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And then? I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And what next? I get laid, I take a short holiday, but very soon after I fall upon those same thorns with gratification in pain, or suffering in joy - who knows what the mixture is! What good, what lasting good is there in me? Is there nothing else between birth and death but what I can get out of this perversity - only a favorable balance of disorderly emotions? No freedom? Only impulses? And what about all the good I have in my heart - does it mean anything? Is it simply a joke? A false hope that makes a man feel the illusion of worth? And so he goes on with his struggles. But this good is no phony. I know it isn't. I swear it.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

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

“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

“If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“I love solitude but I prize it most when company is available.”
― Saul Bellow

“You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half. ”
― Saul Bellow, Seize the Day

“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, Henderson the Rain King

“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, Conversations with Saul Bellow

“You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it. ”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“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, Humboldt's Gift

“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.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

“Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“She's very pretty but she's honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won't spread.”
― Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

“How should I know why! I didn't invent human beings, Iggy.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures Of Augie March

“It seems, after all that there are no nonpeculiar people.”
― Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

“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, Henderson, The Rain King

“Conquered people tend to be witty.”
― Saul Bellow

“He believed that he must, that he could and would recover the good things, the happy things, the easy tranquil things of life. He had made mistakes, but he could overlook these. He had been a fool, but that could be forgiven. The time wasted--must be relinquished. What else could one do about it? Things were too complex, but they might be reduced to simplicity again. Recovery was possible.”
― Saul Bellow

“No, really, Herr Nietzche, I have great admiration for you. Sympathy. You want to make us able to live with the void. Not lie ourselves into good-naturedness, trust, ordinary middling human considerations, but to question as has never been questioned before, relentlessly, with iron determination, into evil, through evil, past evil, accepting no abject comfort. The most absolute, the most piercing questions. Rejecting mankind as it is, that ordinary, practical, thieving, stinking, unilluminated, sodden rabble, not only the laboring rabble, but even worse the "educated" rabble with its books and concerts and lectures, its liberalism and its romantic theatrical "loves" and "passions"--it all deserves to die, it will die. Okay. Still, your extremists must survive. No survival, no Amor Fati. Your immoralists also eat meat. They ride the bus. They are only the most bus-sick travelers. Humankind lives mainly upon perverted ideas. Perverted, your ideas are no better than those the Christianity you condemn. Any philosopher who wants to keep his contact with mankind should pervert his own system in advance to see how it will really look a few decades after adoption. I send you greetings from this mere border of grassy temporal light, and wish you happiness, wherever you are. Yours, under the veil of Maya, M.E.H.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“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, Seize the Day

“Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

“She sits and listens with crossed legs under the batik house-wrap she wears, with her heavy three-way-piled hair and cigarette at her mouth and refuses me - for the time being, anyway - the most important things I ask of her.

It's really kind of tremendous how it all takes place. You'd never guess how much labor goes into it. Only some time ago it occurred to me how great an amount. She came back from the studio and went to take a bath, and from the bath she called out to me, "Darling, please bring me a towel." I took one of those towel robes that I had bought at the Bon Marche' department store and came along with it. The little bathroom was in twilight. In the auffe-eua machine, the brass box with teeth of gas
burning, the green metal dropped crumbs inside from the thousand-candle blaze. Her body with its warm woman's smell was covered with water starting in a calm line over her breasts. The glass of the medicine chest shone (like a deep blue place in the wall, as if a window to the evening sea and not the ashy fog of Paris. I sat down with the robe over my; shoulder and felt very much at peace. For a change the apartment seemed clean and was warm; the abominations were gone into the background, the stoves drew well and they shone. Jacqueline was cooking dinner and it smelled of gravy. I felt settled and easy, my chest free and my fingers comfortable and open. And now here's the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought you were going around
idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moiling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself? Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.”
― Saul Bellow, All Marbles Accounted for

“There is no limit to the amount of intelligence invested in ignorance when the need for illusion runs deep.”
― Saul Bellow

“I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.”
― Saul Bellow

“I should have written you a letter, it was too late to make the deaths of my brothers an excuse. Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful answer is that while I can gear myself up to do a novel, letters, real-life communications, are too much for me. I used to rattle them off easily enough; why is the challenge of writing to friends and acquaintances too much for me now? 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

“Fidelity is for phonographs”
― Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

“She was what we used to call a suicide blond - dyed by her own hand.”
― Saul Bellow

“One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me.”
― Saul Bellow

“But what is the philosophy of this generation? Not God is dead, that point was passed long ago. Perhaps it should be stated Death is God. This generation thinks – and this is its thought of thoughts – that nothing faithful, vulnerable, fragile can be durable or have any true power. Death waits for these things as a cement floor waits for a dropping light bulb. The brittle shell of glass loses its tiny vacuum with a burst, and that is that. And this is how we teach metaphysics on each other. "You think history is the history of loving hearts? You fool! Look at these millions of dead. Can you pity them, feel for them? You can nothing! There were too many. We burned them to ashes, we buried them with bulldozers. History is the history of cruelty, not love as soft men think.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“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.”
― Saul Bellow

“I mean you have been disappointed in love, but don't you know how many things there are to be disappointed in besides love? You are lucky to be still disappointed in love. Later it may be even more terrible.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March