Quotes from Saul Bellow

... an era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age.

I have begun in old age to understand...that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others.

...there is no old age of the soul.

From Euclid to Newton there were straight lines. The modern age analyzes the wavers.

I'm glad I haven't lived in vain.

But a man's character is his fate... 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.

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.

The more realistic you are the more you threaten the grounds of your own art.

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

When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.

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.

(Socrates) said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born.

Death deserves dignity.

A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.

I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we are all put together. We are so proud of our autonomy that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others. One of the booby traps of freedomwhich is bordered on all sides by isolationis that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at lifes banquet.

She was what we used to call a suicide blonde - dyed by her own hand.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.

A man is only as good as what he loves