Quotes from Saul Bellow

A man may say, "From now on I'm going to speak the truth." But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking.

A writer should be able to express himself easily, naturally, copiously in a form that frees his mind, his energies. Why should he hobble himself with formalities?

I want to tell you, don't marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it's adultery.

There are evils, as someone has pointed out, that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever -- money, for instance, or war.

Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.

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

It is sometimes necessary to repeat what we all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location, and avoid originality.

In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness.

Every book, every story, has a sort of invisible signature at the front. And when you've written the first few lines of a story, those govern all the rest that follows.

Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it. They should, because they put it all in beforehand. It's like an Easter Egg hunt.

When I finish something, I generally put it on the shelf, and I very seldom look at it unless somebody mentions it to me, and then I open the book, and I read it, and I say, "Did I do that?"

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!

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands--someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

I have always had a weakness for footnotes. For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a text.

I am simply a human being, more or less.

Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be glad to read him.

A person is only as good as what they love.

The idea of making the century's great crime look dull is not banal. Politically, psychologically, the Germans had an idea of genius. The banality was only camouflage. What better way to get the curse out of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring, or trite?… Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience.

Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.

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.

I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.

Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize.

The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize.

There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever... money, for instance, or war.