Saul Bellow quotes

Saul Bellow was a Canadian-American novelist and Nobel Prize winner, celebrated for his richly detailed characters and profound exploration of modern life. His works grapple often with themes of identity, alienation, and the search for meaning in contemporary society. He greatly influenced American literature and is remembered as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. Here are 121 of his quotes:

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

Saul Bellow

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

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

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

Saul Bellow

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

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

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

Saul Bellow

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

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

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

Conquered people tend to be witty.

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

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

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

Saul Bellow

Take our politicians they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize.

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

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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