Saul Bellow Quotes - Page 8

It's not up to me ... to make the world consistent.

I am something of a crank about sleep, for if I get seven and a quarter hours instead of eight I feel afflicted and drag myself around, although there's nothing really wrong with me. It's just another idea. That's how it is with my ideas; they seem to get strong while I weaken.

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.

The writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he [or she] can at times come between the madly distracted and the distractions.

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

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.

Unless you're completely exploded, there's always something to be grateful for.

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

Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was "broken.

I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.

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.

I'm afraid there's nothing we can do about the journalists; we can only hope that they will die off as the deerflies do towards the end of August.

You're all alone when you're a writer. Sometimes you just feel you need a humanity bath. Even a ride on the subway will do that. But it's much more interesting to talk about books. After all, that's what life used to be for writers: they talk books, politics, history, America. Nothing has replaced that.

In here, the human bosom -- mine, yours, everybody's -- there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul. Now! Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?' Are you with me?

... a fellow can't predict what he will pick up in the form of influence.

The hour that burst the spirit's sleep.

Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent?

I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.

If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

There is simply too much to think about.

I’ve had all the monstrosity I want.

There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.

Guys like you make life easy for some women.

A writer is a reader moved to emulation.

She's very pretty but she's honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won't spread.