Saul Bellow Quotes - Page 6

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• Is our species crazy? Plenty of evidence.

  Saul Bellow

  Crazy, Mental Illness, Evidence

  Saul Bellow (2015). “Mr. Sammler's Planet”, p.61, Odyssey Editions

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• There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.

  Saul Bellow

  Life, Emptiness, Kind

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• The main reason for rewriting is not to achieve a smooth surface, but to discover the inner truth of your characters.

  Saul Bellow

  Character, Rewriting, Reason

  Saul Bellow, Gloria L. Cronin, Ben Siegel (1994). “Conversations with Saul Bellow”, p.45, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.

  Saul Bellow

  Gone, May, Firsts

  Saul Bellow (2016). “To Jerusalem and Back”, p.33, Odyssey Editions

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

  Saul Bellow

  Confiding

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

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• 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.

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• 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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• 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

  Reading, Eye, Two

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• 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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• 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

  Definitions, Conscious, Analysts

  Saul Bellow (2016). “The Dean's December”, p.245, Odyssey Editions

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• I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

  Saul Bellow

  Character, Fate, Men

  1953 The Adventures of Augie March.

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• But a man's character is his fate... and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

  Saul Bellow

  Character, Fate, Men

  Saul Bellow (2003). “Novels, 1944-1953”

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• 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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• I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally.

  Saul Bellow

  Men, Long, Giving

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• How should I know why! I didn't invent human beings, Iggy.

  Saul Bellow

  Should, Humans, Knows

  Saul Bellow (2012). “The Adventures of Augie March”, p.515, Penguin UK

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• 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

  Who We Are, Life Is, Longing

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

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• 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)

  Saul Bellow

  People, Challenges, Toby

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• Fidelity is for phonographs

  Saul Bellow

  Fidelity, Phonograph

  Saul Bellow (2008). “Humboldt's Gift”, Penguin Classics

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• I don't know exactly how it's done. I let it alone a good deal.

  Saul Bellow

  Done, Crafts, Deals

  Saul Bellow, Gloria L. Cronin, Ben Siegel (1994). “Conversations with Saul Bellow”, p.65, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• 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.

  Saul Bellow

  Heart, Order, Mind

  Saul Bellow (2008). “Humboldt's Gift”, Penguin Classics

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

  Saul Bellow

  Oppression, Accuracy, Suppression

  The Adventures of Augie March ch. 1 (1953)

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• A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice.

  Saul Bellow

  Justice, Diversity, Promise

  1976 Nobel prize lecture, Stockholm,12 Dec.

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• A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

  Saul Bellow

  Writing, Study, Novel

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• Each man has his own batch of poems.

  Saul Bellow

  Men, Poetry

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

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• Unless you're completely exploded, there's always something to be grateful for.

  Saul Bellow

  Grateful, Be Grateful, Showing Gratitude

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