Top 234 Quotes & Sayings by Saul Bellow

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Saul Bellow.

Last updated on November 4, 2024.

Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.

American - Writer | June 10, 1915 - April 5, 2005

Source: Wikipedia

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

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries.

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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

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

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

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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.

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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.

Saul Bellow

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

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

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

Saul Bellow

No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

Saul Bellow

What is art but a way of seeing?

Saul Bellow

Conquered people tend to be witty.

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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

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

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.

Saul Bellow

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

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

A man is only as good as what he loves.

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. But the over-examined life makes you wish you were dead. Given the alternative, I'd rather be living.

Saul Bellow

There are times when the most practical thing is to lie down.

Saul Bellow

Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can't open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated.

Saul Bellow

A plan relieves you of the torment of choice.

Saul Bellow

Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity.

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

I would like to explain that I consider prayer above all an act of gratitude for existence.

Saul Bellow

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

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

Human character is smaller now, people don't have durable passions; they've replaced passions with excitement.

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

...there is no old age of the soul.

Saul Bellow

The best and purest human beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred.

Saul Bellow

Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.

Saul Bellow

Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees.

Saul Bellow

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.

Saul Bellow

In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While in the parlors of indignation the right-thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil. (p. 51)

Saul Bellow

Our society, like decadent Rome, has turned into an amusement society, with writers chief among the court jesters

Saul Bellow

When the striving ceases, there is life waiting as a gift.

Saul Bellow

Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.

Saul Bellow

Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.

Saul Bellow

Language is a spiritual mansion in which you live and nobody has the right to evict you.

Saul Bellow

I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.

Saul Bellow

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.

Saul Bellow

A man must have limits and cannot give in to the wild desires to be everything and everyone and everything to everyone.

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

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

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

Excuse me ... but I reject your definitions of me.

Saul Bellow