Quotes from Saul Bellow

Our society, like decadent Rome, has turned into an amusement society, with writers chief among the court jesters

Language is a spiritual mansion in which you live and nobody has the right to evict you.

There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

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

To tell the truth I never had it so good. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy.

Retirement is an illusion. Not a reward but a mantrap. The bankrupt underside of success. A shortcut to death. Golf courses are too much like cemeteries.

The best and purest human beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred.

When the striving ceases, there is life waiting as a gift.

One of the booby traps of freedom - which is bordered on all sides by isolation - is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life's banquet.

Art is order, made out of the chaos of life.

The two real problems in life are boredom and death.

Let the enemies of life step down.

You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.

My face too blind, my mind too limited, my instincts too narrow. But this intensity, doesn't it mean anything?

Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real--the here-and-now. Seize the day.

Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep.

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.

There is no limit to the amount of intelligence invested in ignorance when the need for illusion runs deep.

One must bear in mind the odd angle or slant that the rays of love have to take in order to reach a heart like mine.

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

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. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.

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.

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!