Saul Bellow Quotes

Canadian-American writer (1915–2005)

Saul Bellow (10 June 1915 – 5 April 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 and the National Medal of Arts in 1988.

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Birth Name: Solomon Bellows

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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.

At moments I dislike having a face, a nose, lips, because he has them.

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

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.

Sentiment and brutality, never one without the other, like fossils and oil.

Fidelity is for phonographs

For God's sake,' the dog is saying, 'open the universe a little more!

A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.

The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.

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)

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

I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. And this needs no doctrine or theology of suffering. We love apocalypses too much, and crisis ethics and florid extremism with its thrilling language. Excuse me, no. I've had all the monstrosity I want.

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.

You don't know the meaning of true love if you think it can be deliberately selected. You just love, that's all. A natural force, irresistible.

I pretended not to understand. One of life's hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow. I think I succeeded, thought Herzog.