Canadian-American writer (1915-2005)
Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.
SAUL BELLOW
Dangling Man
You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.
SAUL BELLOW
Herzog
From my earliest days I had a conviction that I was here to write certain things and so from the age of 13, I kept working at that. I was always very busy with my "project" so I'm afraid that I didn't notice much. Much of life has escaped me.
SAUL BELLOW
The Guardian, Sep. 10, 1997
Being right was largely a matter of explanations.
SAUL BELLOW
Mr. Sammler's Planet
People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.
SAUL BELLOW
Conversations with Saul Bellow
In every direction, the walls of life are tiled with such facts so that you can never account for them all, only note some of the more conspicuous ones.
SAUL BELLOW
Ravelstein
You see kids, little boys, practicing the jeers of their television heroes--they shape themselves on such models. It’s a strange conformity to what’s thrust at them; they adopt it and adapt it and play with it.
SAUL BELLOW
AGNI interview, 1997
One reason why violence is so popular may be that psychiatric insights have worn us out and we get satisfaction from seeing them blown away with automatic weapons.
SAUL BELLOW
Ravelstein
Fiction, in the magazines, is presently going to be in the same position as poetry, namely filler. A respectable kind of filler.
SAUL BELLOW
interview, Nov. 24, 1990
I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm.
SAUL BELLOW
The Paris Review, winter 1966
I didn't want to be ignored. I didn't want my books to be ignored. But I didn't really care to cut such a figure either because ... well, it interferes with the business of writing.
SAUL BELLOW
Q & A at Howard Community College, Feb. 1986
You become a writer because you are convinced that you have a grip on reality of a certain distinctive kind. It belongs to you and to others who share such a recognition.
SAUL BELLOW
AGNI interview, 1997
Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
SAUL BELLOW
"Him with His Foot in His Mouth", Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories
Greatness without models? Inconceivable. One could not be the thing itself -- Reality. One must be satisfied with symbols.
SAUL BELLOW
Mr. Sammler's Planet
Strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.
SAUL BELLOW
Ravelstein
Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.
SAUL BELLOW
The Adventures of Augie March
In the 1920s and '30s artists went to Paris and had a hell of a good time, as I tried to do in '48. I went there directly after the war because I was eager to see the action. But I found no great action when I got there. There were not many flowers of culture in 1947-48. Everybody concentrated on gluing the pieces together. For artists the great age had already been petering out before the war. By the great age I mean the international culture -- the gathering in Paris of a group of great figures, few of them French: Stein, Hemingway, Joyce, Pound, Picasso, Brancusi, Modigliani, Diaghilev, Stravinski, and so on. It was an international culture that made Paris its headquarters. But it was French only in location.
SAUL BELLOW
Contemporary Literature, 1984
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.
SAUL BELLOW
Henderson the Rain King
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
"There Is Simply Too Much to Think About,", It All Adds Up
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.
SAUL BELLOW
Q & A at Howard Community College, Feb. 1986