Saul Bellow
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.Collection: Pride
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.Collection: Imagination
For God's sake,' the dog is saying, 'open the universe a little more!Collection: Dog
... unless you made your life a turning point, there was no reason for existing.Collection: Transformation
The sand swallows burst out of their scupper holes in the bluffs and out over the transparent drown of the water, back again to the white, to the brown, to the black, from moving to stock-still sand waves and water-worked woods and roots that hugged and twisted in the sun.Collection: Moving
Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.Collection: Religious
The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business.Collection: Real
I mean you have been disappointed in love, but don't you know how many things there are to be disappointed in besides love? You are lucky to be still disappointed in love. Later it may be even more terrible.Collection: Love You
O Lord! he concluded, forgive all these trespasses. Lead me not into Penn Station.Collection: Forgiving
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.Collection: Soul
I am an American – Chicago born.Collection: Chicago
The only real distinction at this dangerous moment in human history and cosmic development has nothing to do with medals and ribbons. Not to fall asleep is distinguished. Everything else is mere popcorn.Collection: Art
It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.Collection: Generosity
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.Collection: Europe
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.Collection: Believe
The only truly intersting side of the matter was the intimate design of the injury, the fact that it was so penetrating, custom-made exactly to your measure. It's fascinating that hatred should be so personal as to be almost loving. The knife and the wound aching for each other.Collection: Knives
... a fellow can't predict what he will pick up in the form of influence.Collection: Influence
... an era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age.Collection: Confusion
It is wrong to turn a man (a subject) into a thing (an object). By means of spiritual dialogue, the I-It relationship becomes an I-Thou relationship. God comes and goes in man's soul. And men come and go in each other's souls. Sometimes they come and go in each other's beds, too.Collection: Spiritual
And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.Collection: Names
One of the booby traps of freedom - which is bordered on all sides by isolation - is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life's banquet.Collection: Freedom
Certain blood will be given for half certain reasons, as in all wars.Collection: War
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.Collection: Country
We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans -- convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.Collection: America
Art is order, made out of the chaos of life.Collection: Art
A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.Collection: Sick
Unfortunately for the betterment of mankind it is not always the fair-minded who are in the right.Collection: Mankind
Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.Collection: Taken
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.Collection: Book
Well, everybody has a history.Collection: History
Is our species crazy? Plenty of evidence.Collection: Crazy
An exchange occurs between man and woman. Love and thought complete each other in the human pair, and something like an exchange of souls takes place, according to the divine plan.Collection: Love
(Socrates) said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Gone
The main reason for rewriting is not to achieve a smooth surface, but to discover the inner truth of your characters.Collection: Character
What Homo sapien imagines, he may slowly convert himself to.Collection: Imagination
There is much to be said for exotic marriages. If your husband is a bore, it takes years longer to discover.Collection: Husband
Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Underestimate
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?Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Brother
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.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Character
The spirit knows that its growth is the real aim of existence.Collection: Real
Love is the most potent cosmetic.Collection: Love
Retirement is an illusion. Not a reward but a mantrap. The bankrupt underside of success. A shortcut to death. Golf courses are too much like cemeteries.Collection: Retirement
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.Collection: Soul
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.Collection: Kissing
How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants the opinion of a group?Collection: Groups