Canadian-American writer (1915-2005)
People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.
SAUL BELLOW
Conversations with Saul Bellow
I am quite prepared to admit that being habitual liars and self-deluders, we have good cause to fear the truth, but I'm not at all ready to stop hoping. There may be some truths that are, after all, our friends in the universe.
SAUL BELLOW
The Paris Review, winter 1966
Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.
SAUL BELLOW
The Adventures of Augie March
I don’t knock films or television shows, but they nail you down to a kind of externality. Nothing is going to be communicated which demands a softer approach--or let’s say a more insidious approach--into the soul.
SAUL BELLOW
AGNI interview, 1997
Well I gave a lot of time to women and if I had my time again I don't think I would do it that way. I was letting my neurosis monopolise my life.
SAUL BELLOW
The Guardian, Sep. 10, 1997
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.
SAUL BELLOW
"There Is Simply Too Much to Think About,", It All Adds Up
I see a great many things now that I couldn't see when I was a young person. And I don't like everything that I see. For instance, I see people spending about fifty hours a week in front of the tv, which means that they have no more family life, they belong to the crowd, so to speak, they belong to the media, and they have no individual perspective, they derive their observations, they get them ready made from somebody who packages them. I don't think that's a very good thing for anybody.
SAUL BELLOW
Q & A at Howard Community College, Feb. 1986
Fiction, in the magazines, is presently going to be in the same position as poetry, namely filler. A respectable kind of filler.
SAUL BELLOW
interview, Nov. 24, 1990
I don't like to write from a flat, cold position. You must like what you're doing very much or like the people -- either like them or hate them. You can't be indifferent.
SAUL BELLOW
Q & A at Howard Community College, Feb. 1986
Fitness was not his cup of tea. He treated his body like a vehicle -- a motorbike that he raced at top speed along the rim of the Grand Canyon.
SAUL BELLOW
Ravelstein
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
"The Distracted Public,", It All Adds Up
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.
SAUL BELLOW
introduction, The Closing of the American Mind
Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.
SAUL BELLOW
The Adventures of Augie March
I suppose that all of us have a primitive prompter or commentator within, who from earliest years has been advising us, telling us what the real world is. There is such a commentator in me. I have to prepare the ground for him. From this source come words, phrases, syllables; sometimes only sounds, which I try to interpret, sometimes whole paragraphs, fully punctuated.
SAUL BELLOW
The Paris Review, winter 1966
In the 1920s and '30s artists went to Paris and had a hell of a good time, as I tried to do in '48. I went there directly after the war because I was eager to see the action. But I found no great action when I got there. There were not many flowers of culture in 1947-48. Everybody concentrated on gluing the pieces together. For artists the great age had already been petering out before the war. By the great age I mean the international culture -- the gathering in Paris of a group of great figures, few of them French: Stein, Hemingway, Joyce, Pound, Picasso, Brancusi, Modigliani, Diaghilev, Stravinski, and so on. It was an international culture that made Paris its headquarters. But it was French only in location.
SAUL BELLOW
Contemporary Literature, 1984
You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.
SAUL BELLOW
Seize the Day
You have one of two choices. Either you can panic and start making frantic attempts to reform under the glare of these awful critical eyes, or you can just say, "The hell with you! I know what I'm doing. If you don't yet, it's because you haven't given me an attentive reading.
SAUL BELLOW
Q & A at Howard Community College, Feb. 1986
There’s a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.
SAUL BELLOW
AGNI interview, 1997
Things that you write are in some degree autobiographical, but the first thing you find out about autobiography is that it's the hardest thing in the world to write. It's hard because it's very difficult to be absolutely factual about yourself. So ... when you write, you may draw on facts from your own life, but if their not in harmony with your story, they're worse than useless. You just stumble over them.
SAUL BELLOW
Q & A at Howard Community College, Feb. 1986
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.
SAUL BELLOW
foreword, The Closing of the American Mind