Saul Bellow Quotes

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.

Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity.

I've discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.'

In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While in the parlors of indignation the right-thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil. (p. 51)

All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!

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

Towards the end of your life you have something like a pain schedule to fill out—a long schedule like a federal document, only it's your pain schedule. Endless categories. First, physical causes—like arthritis, gallstones, menstrual cramps. New category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist? If love cuts them up so much....

Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.

Strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.

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

Conquered people tend to be witty.

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

It seems, after all that there are no nonpeculiar people.

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

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

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.

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.

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

What is art but a way of seeing?

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.

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

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

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.