Quotes from Saul Bellow

Love is the most potent cosmetic.

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.

Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself out of life for purposes of love--or what good is it?

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.

The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it — that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.

An exchange occurs between man and woman. Love and thought complete each other in the human pair, and something like an exchange of souls takes place, according to the divine plan.

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.

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

How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants the opinion of a group?

I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally.

I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side.

I've had all the monstrosity I want.

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

The truth is, we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult, the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience.

Our society, like decadent Rome, has turned into an amusement society, with writers chief among the court jesters - not so much above the clatter as part of it.

A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out.

The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business.

Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.

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.

A man must have limits and cannot give in to the wild desires to be everything and everyone and everything to everyone.

Also, he was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage; it is harder to find out how he feels.

"What do women want?" "They eat green salad and drink human blood."

Guys like you make life easy for some women.

In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too