Saul Bellow Quotes

Public virtue is a kind of ghost town into which anyone can move and declare himself sheriff.

But Fonstein belonged to an even more advanced category…their aim is to convert weaknesses and secrets into burnable energy. A first-class man subsists on the matter he destroys, just as the stars do.

The modern reader (or viewer, or listener: let’s include everybody) is perilously overloaded. His attention is, to use the latest lingo, ‘targeted’ by powerful forces—Our consciousness is a staging area, a field of operations for all kinds of enterprises, which make free use of it.

Erotic practices have become diversified. Sex used to be a single-crop farming, like cotton or wheat ; now people raise all kinds of things.

The secret motive of the absent-minded is to be innocent while guilty. Absent-mindedness is spurious innocence.

As a rule Corde avoided cemeteries and never went near the graves of his parents. He said it was just as easy for your dead to visit you, only by now he would have to hire a hall.

Tears may be intellectual, but they can never be political. They save no man from being shot, no child from being thrown alive into the furnace.

The feeling individual appeared weak—he felt only his own weakness. But if he accepted his weakness and his separateness and descended into himself, intensifying his loneliness, he discovered his solidarity with other isolated creatures.

After all these years wallowing in low seriousness—low seriousness, you understand, is high seriousness that’s failed.

The only real distinction at this dangerous moment in human history and cosmic development has nothing to do with medals and ribbons. Not to fall asleep is distinguished. Everything else is mere popcorn.

The idea, any way, was to ward off trouble. But now the moronic inferno had caught up with me.

There is much to be said for exotic marriages. If your husband is a bore, it takes years longer to discover.

Mr Sammler with his screwy visions! He saw the increasing triumph of Enlightenment—Liberty, Equality, Adultery!

I am more stupid about some things than about others; not equally stupid in all directions; I am not a well-rounded person.

No wonder the really powerful men in our society, whether politicians or scientists, hold writers in contempt.They do it because they get no evidence from modern literature that anybody is thinking about any significant question.

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