Top 234 Quotes & Sayings by Saul Bellow - Page 3

You have one of two choices. Either you can panic and start making frantic attempts to reform under the glare of these awful critical eyes, or you can just say, "The hell with you! I know what I'm doing. If you don't yet, it's because you haven't given me an attentive reading.

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.

Each man has his own batch of poems.

"What do women want?" "They eat green salad and drink human blood."

A writer is in the broadest sense a spokesman of his community. Through him that community comes to know its heart. Without such knowledge, how long can it survive?

How should I know why! I didn't invent human beings, Iggy.

The best argument is an undeniably good book.

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.

But a man's character is his fate... 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.

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.

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

There is much to be said for exotic marriages. If your husband is a bore, it takes years longer to discover.

Also, he was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage; it is harder to find out how he feels.

Let the enemies of life step down.

A person either creates or destroys. There is no neutrality.

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.

Facts always are sensational.

Brother raises a hand against brother and son against father (how terrible!) and the father also against son. And moreover it is a continuity-matter, for if the father did not strike the son, they would not be alike. It is done to perpetuate similarity. Oh, Henderson, man cannot keep still under the blows.... A hit B? B hit C?--we have not enough alphabet to cover the condition. A brave man will try to make the evil stop with him. He shall keep the blow. No man shall get it from him, and that is a sublime ambition.

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. Out of the struggle at the center has come 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.

Nobody asks you to love the whole world, only to be honest, ehrlich. Don't have a loud mouth. The more you love people the more they'll mix you up. A child loves, a person respects. Respect is better than love.

The main reason for rewriting is not to achieve a smooth surface, but to discover the inner truth of your characters.

But privately when things got very bad I often looked into books to see whether I could find some helpful words, and one day I read, "The forgiveness of sins is perpetual and righteousness first is not required." This impressed me so deeply that I went around saying it to myself. But then I forgot which book it was.

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

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.

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

I pretended not to understand. One of life's hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow. I think I succeeded, thought Herzog.

Well, everybody has a history.

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.

The secret motive of the absent-minded is to be innocent while guilty. Absent-mindedness is spurious innocence.

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.

The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas which frequently deny its very existence, and which indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether.

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

Fun comes hard - like, alas, its prarens, pleasure and happiness, whom we have to pursue.

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

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.

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

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

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

Fidelity is for phonographs

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.

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?

And what about all the good I have in my heart - does it mean anything?

And I said to myself that unless you conceive Death to be a violent guerrilla and kidnaper who snatches those you love, and if you are not cowardly and cannot submit to such terrorism as civilized people now do in every department of life, you must pursue and inquire and explore every possibility and seek everywhere and try everything.

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

You have, like the external world, your own phenomena inside.

But she's a nut, and nuts win.

...is the carbon molecule lined with thought?

A man may say, "From now on I'm going to speak the truth." But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking.

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.

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

My face too blind, my mind too limited, my instincts too narrow. But this intensity, doesn't it mean anything?

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.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice.

It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality.

It's not up to me ... to make the world consistent.

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. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Unless you're completely exploded, there's always something to be grateful for.

Death deserves dignity.

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.

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.