"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

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

"Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door."
— Saul Bellow

"A writer is a reader moved to emulation."
— Saul Bellow

"I am a phoenix who runs after arsonists."
— Saul Bellow

"A man is only as good as what he loves."
— Saul Bellow

"When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice"
— Saul Bellow

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

"If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog."
— Saul Bellow (Herzog)

"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

"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)

"Boredom is the shriek of unused capacities."
— Saul Bellow

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

"Live or die but don't poison everything."
— 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 (Henderson the Rain King)

"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)

""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

"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)

"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)

""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

"If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me."
— 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)

"How should I know why! I didn't invent human beings, Iggy."
— Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March)

"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."
— Saul Bellow (A Theft)

"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)

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

"Sometimes I wished I could become a shoemaker too."
— Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March)

"The hour that burst the spirit's sleep..."
— Saul Bellow (Henderson the Rain King)

"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)

"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."
— Saul Bellow (Herzog)

" Ours is a bourgeois civilization. I am not using this term in its Marxian sense. Chicken! In the vocabularies of modern art and religion it is bourgeois to consider that the universe was made for our safe use and to give us comfort, ease, and support. Light travels at a quarter of a million miles per second so that we can see to comb our hair or read in the paper that ham hocks are cheaper than yesterday. 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. "
— Saul Bellow

"Guys like you make life easy for some women."
— Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March)

"These, said Conrad, knew the world by systematic examination. To begin with the artist had only himself; he descended within himself and in the lonely regions to which he descended, he found "the terms of his appeal". He appealed, said Conrad, "to that part of our being which is a gift, not an acquisition, to the capacity for delight and wonder... our sense of pity and pain, to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation - and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts... which binds together all humanity - the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."
— Saul Bellow

"People can lose their lives in libraries, they ought to be warned"
— 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)

"With small nose, gross thighs, and those back-bent smoke-dyed fingers, he obliged me with this explanation, and he thought to have more effect on me than he really ever could have. When I didn't argue he was satisfied that he had persuaded me, and was not the first to make that mistake."
— Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March)

"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)

"Do we always, always to the point of misery, do a thing?"
— Saul Bellow (Mr. Sammler's Planet)

"People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned."
— 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.
(Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)"
— Saul Bellow (Ravelstein: Readers Guide)

"Because he let the entire world press upon him. For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person.Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do."
— Saul Bellow

"'For God's sake,' the dog is saying, 'open the universe a little more!'"
— Saul Bellow (The Dean's December)

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

"Conquered people tend to be witty."
— Saul Bellow

"I have, perhaps, a slave-like constitution which is too easily restrained by bonds; it then becomes rebellious and bursts out in a comic revolution."
— Saul Bellow

"You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it. "
— Saul Bellow (Herzog)

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