Quotes About Saul Bellow

Fidelity is for phonographs

I pretended not to understand. One of life's hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow. I think I succeeded, thought Herzog.

Yes, these business people have great energy. There's a question as to what's burned to produce it and what things we can and can't burn.

I have, perhaps, a slave-like constitution which is too easily restrained by bonds; it then becomes rebellious and bursts out in a comic revolution.

Again! It was like the question asked by Tennyson about the flower in the crannied wall. That is, to answer it might involve the history of the universe.

But I was afraid I'd have to give up on an ideal explanation of her past life. Oh well, there didn't have to be one necessarily.

Search me, I said. I'm a city boy myself. They must be crocuses.

To have assumed, for instance, that the deterioration of language and its debasement was tantamount to dehumanization led straight to cultural fascism.

No, it was me. I didn't want to leave, but I couldn't stay. Somebody had to take the initiative. I did. Now I'm the fall guy too.

Is it faith? Or is it simply childishness, expecting to be loved for doing your bidden task? It is, if you're looking for the psychological explanation, childish and classically depressive.

As for Sono, she was trying to instruct him, to show how a man should treat a woman. The pride of the peacock, the lust of the goat, and the wrath of the lion are the glory and wisdom of God.

His marriage, too, had been like that. Through such decisions somehow his life had taken form. And so, from the moment when he tasted the peculiar flavor of fatality in Dr. Tamkin, he could no longer keep back the money.

The thing I learned from her was of the utmost importance; namely, that everyone sees to it his fate is shared. Or tries to see to it.

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?

Personally I am advocating such an objective—to make Israel the center of the new civilization (not less!), taking into consideration the evident decline of the Western (and Eastern as well) civilization….

He goes on to say that if we don't have the gift for effecting change, we have "the solace of criticism.

Perhaps the Jews have themselves created such expectations. Israel has made extraordinary efforts to be democratic, equitable, reasonable, capable of change. It has, in fact, transformed its Jews.

California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that.

Once you had read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology.

Strict and literal truthfulness was a trivial game and might even be a disagreeable neurotic affliction.

DeLillo has said that he no longer feels a compulsion to write long, compendious books. In his later years, Saul Bellow said something similar. DeLillo, of course, has written very long in the past, notably with the 850-page Underworld (1997), and his story has been America.

I'm not an especially male novelist, but I think men are better at writing about men, and the same is true for women. Reading Saul Bellow is a revelation, but he can't write women. There are exceptions, like Marilynne Robinson's 'Gilead,' but generally, I think it's true.

I enjoy a misogynist so long as they have a wicked sense of humor and know, on some level, that they're pigs. This is why I enjoy Philip Roth but not Saul Bellow or James Salter.

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