Saul Bellow Quotes

I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into...

There is no limit to the amount of intelligence invested in ignorance when the need for illusion run...

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

Many common lies and hypocrisies are like that, just out of the harmony of the moment.

God may save all, but human rescue is only for a few.

What this means is not a single Tower of Babel plotted in common, but hundreds of thousands of separ...

After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I exp...

He knew what retributions your devils are liable to bring for the way you treat your wife and women ...

Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.

The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it ...

Anyhow, I had found something out about an unknown privation, and I realized how a general love or c...

Anything that just adds information you can't use is plain dangerous. Anyway, there's too much of ev...

Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anythi...

Some big insect flew in and began walking on the table. I don’t know what insect it was, but it was ...

Even if I am not the honestest type in the world I don't want to lie more than is average.

What did Danton lose his head for, or why was there a Napoleon, if it wasn't to make a nobility of u...

It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal...

Everybody wants to have intimate conversations, but the smart fellows don't give out, only the fools...

Oh, God,” Wilhelm prayed, “Let me out of my trouble. Let me out of my thoughts, and let me do someth...

If you could have confidence in nature you would not have to fear. It would keep you up. Creative is...

Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no ...

I have always had a weakness for footnotes. For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a...

He didn't ask "Where will you spend eternity?" as religious the-end-is-near picketers did but rather...

The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is...

The human being now simply can't close his elected garment about himself. Obligations to one's fello...

The noise of the world is so terrible that we can endure it only by being coated with sleep.

I discovered, however, in the early days of our marriage that, in having her way, she put my interes...

And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would ...

The Indian temperament is so excitable, you know.

He was looking for the Knight of Faith, the real prodigy. That real prodigy, having set its relation...

Socrates tried to soothe us, true enough. He said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul...

If you could arrange to avoid that routine job-world, you were an intellectual or an artist. Too res...

As the wicked flee when none pursueth, so does the middle-class wrestle when none contendeth. They c...

Maybe America didn't need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big opera...

What—in other words—would modern boredom be without terror? One of the most boring documents of all ...

No school without spectacular eccentrics and crazy hearts is worth attending.

Just because your soul is being torn to pieces doesn't mean that you stop analyzing the phenomena.

A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evi...

Your authority and my degeneracy are one in the same.

Well, there is a piece of famous advice, grand advice even if it is German, to forget what you can't...

Moses loved his relatives quite openly and even helplessly . . . It was childish of him; he knew tha...

Emancipation resulting in madness. Unlimited freedom to choose and play a tremendous variety of role...

. . . [T]o live in an inspired condition, to know truth, to be free, to love another, to consummate ...

History, memory - that is what makes us human, that, and our knowledge of death: 'by man came death'...

Strict and literal truthfulness was a trivial game and might even be a disagreeable neurotic afflict...

Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.

If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

Just then his state of being was so curious that he was compelled , himself, to see it -- eager, gri...

More commonly suffering breaks people, crushes them, and is simply unilluminating. You see how grues...

You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportuni...

Every treasure is guarded by dragons. That's how you can tell it's valuable.

I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. And this needs no doctrine or theolo...

No true individual has existed yet, able to live, able to die. Only diseased, tragic, or dismal and ...

With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Do...

But then why shouldn't he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living - perhaps mo...

I am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness.

And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do witho...

For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition....

The earth was a grave: our life was lent to it by its elements and had to be returned: a time came w...

. . . Nietzche himself had a Christian view of history, seeing the present moment always as some cri...

In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't mean the cri...

One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

I venture to say Kierkegaard meant that truth has lost its force with us and horrible pain and evil ...

All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is thi...

In the history of the world many souls have been, are, and will be, and with a little reflection thi...

Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there’s the dev...

Brother raises a hand against brother and son against father (how terrible!) and the father also aga...

Shall I run back into the desert ... and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fi...

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

The sun was shut up in a cold bottle.

Wie Gott in Frankreich'' was the expression used by the Jews of Eastern Europe to describe perfect h...

I am not an ornithologist—I am a bird.

There is today an extraordinary interest with the data of modern experience per se. Our absorption i...

Our society like decadent Rome has turned into an amusement society with writers chief among the ...

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

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

The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out a...

A man is only as good as what he loves.

New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the w...

Alternatives and particularly desirable alternatives grow only on imaginary trees.

The truth is we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult the zanines...

The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or hear...

A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him.

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

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

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

At times I feel like a socket that remembers its tooth.

It's usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love...

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

I should have written you a letter, it was too late to make the deaths of my brothers an excuse. Sin...

What is art but a way of seeing?

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

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

Some people embrace their gifts with gratitude. Others have no use for them and can think only of ov...

A man may say, "From now on I'm going to speak the truth." But the truth hears him and runs away and...