Saul Bellow
You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.Collection: Fighting
Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.Collection: Blessing
I love solitude, but I prize it most when plenty of company is available.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Business
He believed that he must, that he could and would recover the good things, the happy things, the easy tranquil things of life. He had made mistakes, but he could overlook these. He had been a fool, but that could be forgiven. The time wasted--must be relinquished. What else could one do about it? Things were too complex, but they might be reduced to simplicity again. Recovery was possible.Collection: Mistake
Strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.Collection: Dangerous
We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects, but endless fire.Collection: Inspirational
The fact that there are so many weak, poor and boring stories and novels written and published in America has been ascribed by our rebels to the horrible squareness of our institutions, the idiocy of power, the debasement of sexual instincts, and the failure of writers to be alienated enough. The poems and novels of these same rebellious spirits, and their theoretical statements, are grimy and gritty and very boring too, besides being nonsensical, and it is evident by now that polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art either.Collection: Art
The dream of man's heart ... is that life may complete in significant pattern.Collection: Dream
From Euclid to Newton there were straight lines. The modern age analyzes the wavers.Collection: Science
I must play the instrument I've got.Collection: Music
...I am much better now at ambiguities.Collection: Ambiguity
Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent?Collection: Thinking
I immersed myself in The Periodic Table gladly and gratefully. There is nothing superfluous here, everything this book contains is essential. It is wonderful pure, and beautifully translated...I was deeply impressed.Collection: Book
It's goodbye to reality when love sets in.Collection: Goodbye
Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can't open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated.Collection: Media
Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.Collection: Perspective
Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. But the over-examined life makes you wish you were dead. Given the alternative, I'd rather be living.Collection: Wish
Language is a spiritual mansion in which you live and nobody has the right to evict you.Collection: Spiritual
I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.Collection: Writing
Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real--the here-and-now. Seize the day.Collection: Real
People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.Collection: Ideas
Excuse me ... but I reject your definitions of me.Collection: Definitions
A man must have limits and cannot give in to the wild desires to be everything and everyone and everything to everyone.Collection: Men
The two real problems in life are boredom and death.Collection: Real
I have begun in old age to understand...that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others.Collection: Age
We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.Collection: Vision
It seems, after all that there are no nonpeculiar people.Collection: People
Towards the end of your life you have something like a pain schedule to fill out - a long schedule like a federal document, only it's your pain schedule. Endless categories. First, physical causes - like arthritis, gallstones, menstrual cramps. New category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist? If love cuts them up so much.Collection: Pain
Our society, like decadent Rome, has turned into an amusement society, with writers chief among the court jestersCollection: Rome
Live or die but don't poison everything.Collection: Poison
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.Collection: Emotional
...America didn't have to fight scarcity and we all felt guilty before people who still had to struggle for bread and freedom in the old way ... We weren't starving, we weren't bugged by the police, locked up in madhouses for our ideas, arrested, deported, slave laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and nights of terror. With our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind. But instead we sleep. Just sleep and sleep, and eat and play and fuss and sleep again.Collection: Struggle
All human accomplishment has this 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!Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: School
Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anythingCollection: Dark
I am moneys medium. It passes through me- taxes, insurance, mortgage, child support, rent, legal fees. All this dignified blundering costs plenty.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Heart
Facts always are sensational.Collection: Facts
Art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential.Collection: Art
Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep.Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Men
Death deserves dignity.Collection: Death
Do we always, always to the point of misery, do a thing?Collection: Misery
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Strong
Myself is thus and so, and will continue thus and so. And why fight it? My balance comes from instability.Collection: Fighting
You have, like the external world, your own phenomena inside.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Heart