Saul Bellow
The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business.Collection: Men
I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Children
It's no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite.Collection: Humility
Death is the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all.Collection: Mirrors
If I had a child of school age, I would send him to one of the Waldorf Schools.Collection: Children
I've 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.'Collection: Love
The physical body is an agent of the spirit and its mirror. It is an engine and a reflection of the spirit. It is the spirit's ingenious memorandum to itself and the spirit sees itself in my body, just as I see my own face in a looking glass. My nerves reflect this. The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.Collection: Dark
The body, she says, is subject to the force of gravity. But the soul is ruled by levity, pure.Collection: Love
With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything.Collection: Sadness
It's usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart.Collection: Selfish
Let the enemies of life step down.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Art
Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.Collection: Real
Unless you're completely exploded, there's always something to be grateful for.Collection: Grateful
Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was "broken.Collection: Heart
I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.Collection: Clever
It would not be practical for her to hate herself. Luckily, God sends a substitute, a husband.Collection: Husband
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.Collection: August
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.Collection: Art
In here, the human bosom -- mine, yours, everybody's -- there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul. Now! Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?' Are you with me?Collection: Art
You're all alone when you're a writer. Sometimes you just feel you need a humanity bath. Even a ride on the subway will do that. But it's much more interesting to talk about books. After all, that's what life used to be for writers: they talk books, politics, history, America. Nothing has replaced that.Collection: Book
The hour that burst the spirit's sleep.Collection: Sleep
If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.Collection: Mind
I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.Collection: Acceptance
I’ve had all the monstrosity I want.Collection: Want
There is simply too much to think about.Collection: Thinking
Guys like you make life easy for some women.Collection: Guy
There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.Collection: Life
A writer is a reader moved to emulation.Collection: Writing
The modern reader (or viewer, or listener: let's include everybody) is perilously overloaded. His attention is, to use the latest lingo,'targeted' by powerful forces? Our consciousness is a staging area, a field of operations for all kinds of enterprises, which make free use of it.Collection: Powerful
She's very pretty but she's honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won't spread.Collection: Sweet
...chaos doesn't run the whole show.Collection: Running
Erotic practices have become diversified. Sex used to be a single-crop farming, like cotton or wheat; now people raise all kinds of things.Collection: Sex
The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature. (Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)Collection: People
One way or another the no doubt mad idea entered my mind that my own actions had historic importance and this fantasy (?) made it appear that people who harmed me were interfering with an important experiment.Collection: Ideas
Great pressure is brought to bear to make us undervalue ourselves. On the other hand, civilization teaches that each of us is an inestimable prize. There are, then, these two preparations: one for life and the other for death. Therefore we value and are ashamed to value ourselves.Collection: Self
I want to tell you, don't marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it's adultery.Collection: Husband
I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.Collection: Art
Those who have a why to live for can bear almost any how. The necessary premise is that a person is somehow more than his or her "characteristics," all the emotions, strivings, tastes, and constructions which it pleases us to call "My Life." We have grounds to hope that a Life is something more than a cloud of particles, mere facticity. Go through what is comprehensible and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light.Collection: Life
I am more stupid about some things than others; not equally stupid in all directions; I am not a well-rounded person.Collection: Stupid
Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees.Collection: Decision
One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.Collection: Existentialism
The stillness in art characterizes prayer, and the eye of the storm.Collection: Art
A person either creates or destroys. There is no neutrality.Collection: Creativity
To tell the truth I never had it so good. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy.Collection: Character
It is a joy to be choked with thought.Collection: Joy
Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.Collection: Real
When I didn't argue he was satisfied he had persuaded me, and was not the first to make that mistake.Collection: Mistake