Quotes from bellow saul iv

Every human life has a secret essence, it's a secret even to the possessor, because you don't know what to make of it.

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.

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.

People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.

Fiction, in the magazines, is presently going to be in the same position as poetry, namely filler. A respectable kind of filler.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects, but endless fire.

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.

There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.