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Saul Bellow

61 quotes

“Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dangling Man (1944) [Penguin Classics, 1996, ], p. 84
“There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted by Granville Hicks in The Living Novel: A Symposium (Macmillan, 1957; digitized version in 2006), p. ix
“Conquered people tend to be witty.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mr. Sammler's Planet, (1976), p. 98
“All human accomplishment has the 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 (1915–2005) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Henderson the Rain King (1959) [Viking/Penguin, 1984, ], ch. XVIII, p. 271
“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 (1915–2005) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Great Jewish Short Stories, introduction to the Dell paperback edition (1963)
“We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Herzog (1964) [Penguin Classics, 2003, ], p. 82
“I think that New York is not the cultural center of America, but the business and administrative center of American culture.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: BBC radio interview, The Listener (London, May 22, 1969)
“Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) [Penguin Classics, 2004, ], p. 156
“Once you had read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Humboldt's Gift (1975) [Penguin Classics, 1996, ], p. 5
“I never yet touched a fig leaf that didn't turn into a price tag.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Humboldt's Gift (1975), p. 159
“Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Humboldt's Gift (1975), p. 265
“No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Humboldt's Gift (1975), p. 452
“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.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nobel Prize lecture (12 December 1976)
“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.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nobel Prize lecture (12 December 1976)
“For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976), p. 38
“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976), p. 127
“All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Dailer's Choice" by Harriet Van Horne, in New York Magazine Vol. 10, No. 13 (28 March 1977), p. 80
“There are evils, as someone has pointed out, that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever — money, for instance, or war.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Dean’s December (1982) [Penguin Classics, 1998, ], ch. 13, p. 140
“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. It's like an Easter Egg hunt.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Dean's December (1982), ch. 18, p. 298
“Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Him with His Foot in His Mouth," from Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984) [Penguin Classics, 1998, ], p. 11
“A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cousins," from Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984), p. 263
“I 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 (1915–2005) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in "Feeling Rejected? Join Updike, Mailer, Oates..." by Barbara Bauer and Robert F. Moss, New York Times (21 July 1985), section 7, page 1, column 1
“Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Portable Curmudgeon (1987) by Jon Winokur, p. 219
“Any artist should be grateful for a naïve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Foreword to The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (1987)
“In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Foreword to The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (1987)
“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The #1 New York Times Bestseller (1992) by John Bear, p. 93
“California's like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Saul Bellow: Treading on the Toes of the Brahmans," interview with Lawrence Grobel in Endangered Species: Writers Talk about Their Craft, Their Visions, Their Lives [Da Capo, 2001, ISBN ], p. 21
“The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, “Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist?” The keen old prof replied, “And who is asking?”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Humboldt’s Gift (1996), p. 163
“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.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a scholar [Allan Bloom] intends to enlighten us, and as a writer he has learned from Aristophanes and other models that enlightenment should also be enjoyable. To me, this is not the book of a professor, but that of a thinker who is willing to take the risks more frequently taken by writers. It is risky in a book of ideas to speak in one’s own voice, but it reminds us that the sources of the truest truths are inevitably profoundly personal. … Academics, even those describing themselves as existentialists, very seldom offer themselves publicly and frankly as individuals, as persons.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The book of the world, so richly studied by autodidacts, is being closed by the “learned,” who are raising walls of opinions to shut the world out.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People reserve their best thinking for their professional specialties and, next in line, for serious matters confronting the alert citizen —economics, politics, the disposal of nuclear waste, etc. The day’s work done, they want to be entertained.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no need to make an inventory of the times. It is demoralizing to describe ourselves to ourselves yet again. It is especially hard on us since we believe (as we have been educated to believe) that history has formed us and that we are all mini-summaries of the present age.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mozart: An Overture" (1992), pp. 13-14
“The principles of Western liberalism seem no longer to lend themselves to effective action. Deprived of the expressive power, we are awed by it, have a hunger for it, and are afraid of it. Thus we praise the gray dignity of our soft-spoken leaders, but in our hearts we are suckers for passionate outbursts, even when those passionate outbursts are hypocritical and falsely motivated.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Literary Notes on Khrushchev" (1961), p. 36
“When we read the best nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists, we soon realize that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a definition of human nature, to justify the continuation of life as well as the writing of novels.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Sealed Treasure" (1960), p. 60
“Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Sealed Treasure" (1960), p. 62
“It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything could be more exciting than the times themselves. What we read daily and view on the TV has thrust imagined forms into the shadow. We are staggeringly rich in facts, in things, and perhaps, like the nouveau riche of other ages, we want our wealth faithfully reproduced by the artist.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Facts That Put Fancy to Flight" (1962), p. 67
“It's hard for writers to get on with their work if they are convinced that they owe a concrete debt to experience and cannot allow themselves the privilege of ranging freely through social classes and professional specialties. A certain pride in their own experience, perhaps a sense of the property rights of others in their experience, holds them back.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Facts That Put Fancy to Flight" (1962), p. 68
“Apparently the rise of consciousness is linked to certain kinds of privation. It is the bitterness of self-consciousness that we knowers know best. Critical of the illusions that sustained mankind in earlier times, this self-consciousness of ours does little to sustain us now. The question is: which is disenchanted, the world itself or the consciousness we have of it?”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Matter of the Soul" (1975), pp. 75-76
“Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Jefferson Lectures" (1977), p. 139
“In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings — about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes — and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty consciousness of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Distracted Public" (1990), p. 156
“Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Distracted Public" (1990), p. 159
“There is simply too much to think about. It is hopeless — too many kinds of special preparation are required. In electronics, in economics, in social analysis, in history, in psychology, in international politics, most of us are, given the oceanic proliferating complexity of things, paralyzed by the very suggestion that we assume responsibility for so much. This is what makes packaged opinion so attractive.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: There Is Simply Too Much to Think About" (1992), pp. 173-174
“One naturally regrets not being an expert or one of those insiders who thoroughly understand. It's hell to be an amateur. A little reflection calms your sorrow, however. The experts in their own little speedboat, the rest of us floating with the rest of mankind in a great barge — that is the picture.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Day They Signed the Treaty" (1979), p. 224
“In politics continental Europe was infantile — horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: My Paris" (1983), p. 235
“We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans — convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Second Half Life" (1991), p. 324
“Much of junk culture has a core of crisis — shoot-outs, conflagrations, bodies weltering in blood, naked embracers or rapist-stranglers. The sounds of junk culture are heard over a ground bass of extremism. Our entertainments swarm with specters of world crisis. Nothing moderate can have any claim to our attention.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Second Half Life" (1991), p. 326
“A millennial belief in a Holy God may have the effect of deepening the soul, but it is also obviously archaic, and modern influences would presently bring me up to date and reveal how antiquated my origins were. To turn away from those origins, however, has always seemed to me an utter impossibility. It would be a treason to my first consciousness to un-Jew myself.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source