Saul Bellow

“Happiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.”

“With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything...”

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

“A man may say, "From now on I'm going to speak the truth." But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking.”

“I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.”

“What is art but a way of seeing?”

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

“Live or die, but don't poison everything.”

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

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

“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.”

“Conquered people tend to be witty.”

“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!”

“We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it — the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.”

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

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

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

“Once you had read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology.”

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

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

“No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.”

“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.”

“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.”

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

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

“There are evils, as someone has pointed out, that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever — money, for instance, or war.”

“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. It's like an Easter Egg hunt.”

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

“A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become.”

“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."”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Death is going to take the boundaries away from us, that we should no more be persons. That's what death is about. When that is what life also wants to be about, how can you feel except rebellious?”

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

“California's like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me.”

“And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish. We would need no personal names of the old sort in the sidereal future, nothing being fixed. We would be designated by other nouns. Days and nights would belong to the museums. The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery. The seas powdering our bones like quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good - a melancholy good.”

“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?””

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The book of the world, so richly studied by autodidacts, is being closed by the “learned,” who are raising walls of opinions to shut the world out.”

“People reserve their best thinking for their professional specialties and, next in line, for serious matters confronting the alert citizen —economics, politics, the disposal of nuclear waste, etc. The day’s work done, they want to be entertained.”

“There is no need to make an inventory of the times. It is demoralizing to describe ourselves to ourselves yet again. It is especially hard on us since we believe (as we have been educated to believe) that history has formed us and that we are all mini-summaries of the present age.”

“The principles of Western liberalism seem no longer to lend themselves to effective action. Deprived of the expressive power, we are awed by it, have a hunger for it, and are afraid of it. Thus we praise the gray dignity of our soft-spoken leaders, but in our hearts we are suckers for passionate outbursts, even when those passionate outbursts are hypocritical and falsely motivated.”

“When we read the best nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists, we soon realize that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a definition of human nature, to justify the continuation of life as well as the writing of novels.”

“Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Apparently the rise of consciousness is linked to certain kinds of privation. It is the bitterness of self-consciousness that we knowers know best. Critical of the illusions that sustained mankind in earlier times, this self-consciousness of ours does little to sustain us now. The question is: which is disenchanted, the world itself or the consciousness we have of it?”

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

“In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings — about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes — and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty consciousness of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight.”

“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.”

“There is simply too much to think about. It is hopeless — too many kinds of special preparation are required. In electronics, in economics, in social analysis, in history, in psychology, in international politics, most of us are, given the oceanic proliferating complexity of things, paralyzed by the very suggestion that we assume responsibility for so much. This is what makes packaged opinion so attractive.”

“One naturally regrets not being an expert or one of those insiders who thoroughly understand. It's hell to be an amateur. A little reflection calms your sorrow, however. The experts in their own little speedboat, the rest of us floating with the rest of mankind in a great barge — that is the picture.”

“In politics continental Europe was infantile — horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer.”

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

“Much of junk culture has a core of crisis — shoot-outs, conflagrations, bodies weltering in blood, naked embracers or rapist-stranglers. The sounds of junk culture are heard over a ground bass of extremism. Our entertainments swarm with specters of world crisis. Nothing moderate can have any claim to our attention.”

“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.”

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

“Reading Decline of the West I learned that in Spengler’s view ours was a Faustian civilization and that we, the Jews, were Magians, the survivors and representatives of an earlier type, totally incapable of comprehending the Faustian spirit that had created the great civilization of the West. … What Magians were to Faustians, Faustians might very well be to Americans.”

“One’s language is a spiritual location. It houses your soul. If you were born in America all essential communication, your deepest conversations with yourself, will be in English. … Your English is the principal instrument of your humanity.”

“What is imposed on us by birth and environment is what we are called upon to overcome.”

“We are free to withdraw (to withdraw our minds where we cannot withdraw our bodies) from situations in which our humanity or lack of it is defined for us.”

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

“The earth was a grave: our life was lent to it by its elements and had to be returned: a time came when the simple elements seemed to long for release from the complicated forms of life, when every element of every cell said, "Enough!" The planet was our mother and our burial ground. No wonder the human spirit wished to leave. Leave this prolific belly. Leave also this great tomb. Passion for the infinite caused by the terror, by timor mortis, needed material appeasement.”

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”