Quotes from Saul Bellow

For fifteen years the Soviet Union has been supporting the Arabs against Israel in the Middle East and all they have to show for it is the humiliation of their protégés and the capture and destruction of their equipment by Israel. The Arabs have shown no inclination toward Communist ideology and their oil continues to flow to the West.

He hikes up his trousers and squats, grinning to himself—both these Arabs find us amusing—and pours water from a green bottle over his toes

A strange heart. I myself can't account for it.

At sixteen John escaped from the Warsaw ghetto, leaving behind his parents and his sister. They were killed. Everyone was killed. John somehow obtained Polish seaman's papers, and for several years he worked in the engine rooms of German freighters. When the war ended he came to Israel via Cyprus

I heard Mrs Pergamon say that she planned to write her memoirs. Then I asked – and Nietzsche might have described the question as springing from my inner Fatum – 'Will you use a typewriter or an adding machine?

joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam, married, and had two children. His first wife died of cancer about ten years ago and he has married again. He says, "I ask myself in what ways my life has not been typical. For a Jew from Eastern Europe it has been completely typical—war, death of mother, death of father, death of sister, four years in disguise among the Germans, death of wife, death of son. Thirty years of hard work, planting and harvesting in the kibbutz. Nothing exceptional.

The subject of all this talk is, ultimately, survival—the survival of the decent society created in Israel within a few decades.

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

You shop in supermarkets, you say good morning to friends on the telephone, you hear symphony orchestras on the radio. But suddenly the music stops and a terrorist bomb is reported. A new explosion outside a coffee shop on the Jaffa Road: six young people killed and thirty-eight more wounded. Pained, you put down your civilized drink.

What you do know is that there is one fact of Jewish life unchanged by the creation of a Jewish state: you cannot take your right to live for granted. Others can; you cannot. This is not to say that everyone else is living pleasantly and well under a decent regime. No, it means only that the Jews, because they are Jews, have never been able to take the right to live as a natural right.

When I was younger I used to think that my good intentions were somehow communicated to people by a secret telepathic wig-wag system. It was therefore disappointing to see at last that unless I spelt things out I couldn't hope to get credit for goodwill.

How lovely she could be! her face was gay and round, pink, the blue of her eyes was clear. Very different from the terrifying menstrual ice of her rages, the look of the murderess.

It is so easy for outsiders to say that there are two sides to the question. What a terrible expression! I am beginning to detest

As for me I say no more. Can I tell Shahar that the "conscience of the West" will never permit Israel to be destroyed? I can say no such thing. Such grand statements are no longer made; all our hyperbole is nowadays reserved for silence.

Israelis must, in fact, bear in mind four thousand years of Jewish history. The world has been thrown into their arms and they are required to perform an incredible balancing act.

How deeply (beyond words) he speaks to us about the mysteries of our common human nature. And how unstrained and easy his greatness is.

From Hitler he might have learned that angry demonstrations unnerve well-conducted people and that in statesmanship the advantage always lies with the unprincipled, the brutal, and the insane. Hitler could at will convulse himself with rage and, when he had gained his ends, be coolly correct to his staff, all in a matter of moments

Why is it that Alsop is writing such a letter, warning Israel that it stands in danger of destruction and reminding it that it has only one protector? It is because "bad trouble has begun between Israel and America." For one thing, Alsop is shocked by Israel's ingratitude to Secretary of State Kissinger.

With her death and the remarriage of my father, the children scattered. I was turned loose—freed, in a sense: free but also stunned, like someone who survives an explosion but hasn't yet grasped what has happened. I didn't know anything. At the age of eighteen, I didn't even know that I was an adolescent. Words like that came later, in the forties and fifties.

I wondered at first whether she might not be feigning timidity out of courtesy to a man of an older generation, but a cold gin moisture came out on her beautiful face and she appeared to be appealing to me do something.

Genius must be the recovery of the powers of childhood by an act of the creative

The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature.

Ben-David knows a lot about the lives of Jews from the Arab countries. He often makes the point that they, too, are refugees who fled from persecution and whose property was confiscated. World opinion concentrates on the Palestinian refugees while these Oriental Jews—nearly a million of them—are given no consideration. It is inevitable that he and I should turn to politics. Sightseeing is all very well, but our heads are full of news, omens, and speculations.

I discovered, however, in the early days of our marriage that, in having her way, she put my interests ahead of her own.