Saul Bellow Quotes

There is 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

I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side.

- Saul Bellow

When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.

- Saul Bellow

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

- Saul Bellow

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

- Saul Bellow

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.

- Saul Bellow

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

- Saul Bellow

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

- Saul Bellow

If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.

- Saul Bellow

In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.

- Saul Bellow

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

- Saul Bellow

A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out.

- Saul Bellow

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

- Saul Bellow

There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever... money, for instance, or war.

- Saul Bellow

People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

- Saul Bellow

A good novel is worth more than the best scientific study.

- Saul Bellow

Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

- Saul Bellow

No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

- Saul Bellow

She was what we used to call a suicide blonde - dyed by her own hand.

- Saul Bellow

Conquered people tend to be witty.

- Saul Bellow

Happiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.

- Saul Bellow

Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.

- Saul Bellow

In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries.

- Saul Bellow

I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.

- Saul Bellow

I'm glad I haven't lived in vain.

- Saul Bellow

California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that.

- Saul Bellow

Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.

- Saul Bellow

What is art but a way of seeing?

- Saul Bellow

We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next.

- Saul Bellow

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

- Saul Bellow

A man is only as good as what he loves.

- Saul Bellow