Saul Bellow Quotes - Page 5

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

  Saul Bellow

  Price Tag, Two Sides, Figs

  "Bellow in his own words". www.theguardian.com. April 6, 2005.

  18 Copy quote

• 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.

  Saul Bellow

  Country, Writing, Hypocrite

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Saul Bellow

  Taken, Keys, People

  Saul Bellow (2010). “Saul Bellow: Letters”, p.422, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

• You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.

  Saul Bellow

  Fighting, Chiefs, Conditions

  Saul Bellow (1976). “Herzog”, Viking Adult

  6 Copy quote

• The more realistic you are the more you threaten the grounds of your own art.

  Saul Bellow

  Art, Realistic

  Saul Bellow, Gloria L. Cronin, Ben Siegel (1994). “Conversations with Saul Bellow”, p.69, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• It's no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite.

  Saul Bellow

  Humility, Feet, Soldier

  SAUL BELLOW (1944). “DANGLING MAN”

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Saul Bellow

  Children, People, World

  Saul Bellow (1984). “The Adventures of Augie March”

  5 Copy quote

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

  Saul Bellow

  War, Evil, Goes On

  "Bellow in his own words". www.theguardian.com. April 6, 2005.

  71 Copy quote

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

  Saul Bellow

  Grateful, Artist, Grace

  Foreword to "The Closing of the American Mind" by Allan Bloom, 1987.

  8 Copy quote

• But there are things you can't consult anybody about.

  Saul Bellow

  Confiding

  Saul Bellow (2013). “More Die of Heartbreak”, p.147, Penguin UK

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Saul Bellow

  Men, Smoking, Hats

  Saul Bellow (2013). “Seize the Day”, p.6, Odyssey Editions

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• 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.

  Saul Bellow

  Art, Disappointment, Philosophy

  Saul Bellow (2015). “There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction”, p.216, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Saul Bellow

  Book, Writing, Sunset

  Saul Bellow (2010). “Saul Bellow: Letters”, p.167, Penguin

  12 Copy quote

• 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.

  Saul Bellow

  Real, Often Can, People

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• 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.

  Saul Bellow

  Selfish, Heart, People

  Saul Bellow (2001). “Collected stories”, Penguin Group USA

  36 Copy quote

• 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.

  Saul Bellow

  Kissing, Faces, Plant

  "Henderson the Rain King". Book by Saul Bellow, February 23, 1959.

  5 Copy quote

• Death is the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all.

  Saul Bellow

  Mirrors, Black

  4 Copy quote

• Unfortunately for the betterment of mankind it is not always the fair-minded who are in the right.

  Saul Bellow

  Mankind, Betterment, Fairs

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• 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.

  Saul Bellow

  Underestimate, Democratic, Impulse

  Saul Bellow (1976). “Herzog”, Viking Adult

  5 Copy quote

• But privately when things got very bad I often looked into books to see whether I could find some helpful words, and one day I read, "The forgiveness of sins is perpetual and righteousness first is not required." This impressed me so deeply that I went around saying it to myself. But then I forgot which book it was.

  Saul Bellow

  Book, One Day, Firsts

  5 Copy quote

• 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?

  Saul Bellow

  Writing, Heart, Long

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• We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans -- convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.

  Saul Bellow

  America, Helping, Evolution

  Saul Bellow (2016). “It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future”, p.280, Odyssey Editions

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• 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.

  Saul Bellow

  Brother, Father, Ambition

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Hands, Feelings, Novelists

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

  Saul Bellow

  Country, California, Needs

  "Bellow in his own words". www.theguardian.com. April 6, 2005.

  12 Copy quote

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