Saul Bellow quotes - page 2

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:

All human accomplishment has the 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!

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

I am a phoenix who runs after arsonists.

Saul Bellow

A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him.

Saul Bellow

I 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."

Saul Bellow

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

Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole.

Saul Bellow

Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.

Saul Bellow

Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.

Saul Bellow

Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.

Saul Bellow

We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.

Saul Bellow

What is art but a way of seeing?

Saul Bellow

It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything could be more exciting than the times themselves. What we read daily and view on the TV has thrust imagined forms into the shadow. We are staggeringly rich in facts, in things, and perhaps, like the nouveau riche of other ages, we want our wealth faithfully reproduced by the artist.

Saul Bellow

A millennial belief in a Holy God may have the effect of deepening the soul, but it is also obviously archaic, and modern influences would presently bring me up to date and reveal how antiquated my origins were. To turn away from those origins, however, has always seemed to me an utter impossibility. It would be a treason to my first consciousness to un-Jew myself.

Saul Bellow

It's hard for writers to get on with their work if they are convinced that they owe a concrete debt to experience and cannot allow themselves the privilege of ranging freely through social classes and professional specialties. A certain pride in their own experience, perhaps a sense of the property rights of others in their experience, holds them back.

Saul Bellow

The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, "Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist?” The keen old prof replied, "And who is asking?”.

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

Saul Bellow

I mean you have been disappointed in love, but don't you know how many things there are to be disappointed in besides love? You are lucky to be still disappointed in love. Later it may be even more terrible.

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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

I never yet touched a fig leaf that didn't turn into a price tag.

Saul Bellow