Quotes by Saul Bellow

About Saul Bellow:

Saul Bellow is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

He yelled, "Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life.

Saul Bellow

Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life.

Saul Bellow

Shall I run back into the desert ... and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven't had enough desert yet.

Saul Bellow

Brother raises a hand against brother and son against father (how terrible!) and the father also against son. And moreover it is a continuity-matter, for if the father did not strike the son, they would not be alike. It is done to perpetuate similari...

Saul Bellow

...between human beings there are only two alternatives, either brotherhood or crime.

Saul Bellow

In the history of the world many souls have been, are, and will be, and with a little reflection this is marvelous and not depressing. Many jerks are made gloomy about it, for they think quantity buries them alive. That's just crazy. Numbers are very...

Saul Bellow

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!

Saul Bellow

Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there’s the devil to pay.

Saul Bellow

What is art but a way of seeing?

Saul Bellow

The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning bus...

Saul Bellow

After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I decided that I would ...

Saul Bellow

What this means is not a single Tower of Babel plotted in common, but hundreds of thousands of separate beginnings, the length and breadth of America. Energetic people who build against pains and uncertainties, as weaker ones merely hope against them...

Saul Bellow

Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.

Saul Bellow

Some big insect flew in and began walking on the table. I don’t know what insect it was, but it was brown, shining, and rich in structures. In the city the big universal chain of insects gets thin, but where there’s a leaf or two it’ll be repre...

Saul Bellow

Many common lies and hypocrisies are like that, just out of the harmony of the moment.

Saul Bellow

That’s the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what’s real

Saul Bellow

It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn't have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal parts. Then it was in the line of human advance that Ei...

Saul Bellow

He knew what retributions your devils are liable to bring for the way you treat your wife and women or behave while your father is on his deathbed, what you ought to think of your pleasure, of acting like a cockroach; he had the intelligence for the ...

Saul Bellow

God may save all, but human rescue is only for a few.

Saul Bellow

Live or die, but don't poison everything.

Saul Bellow

Author Bio

  • NameSaul Bellow
  • DescriptionCanadian-born American writer
  • BornJune 10, 1915
  • DiedApril 5, 2005
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist
  • AwardsNobel Prize In Literature; Guggenheim Fellowship; National Medal Of Arts; National Book Award