1915-, American Novelist
All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
Saul Bellow – [Writers and Writing]
Any artist should be grateful for a nanve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.
Saul Bellow – [Arts and Artists]
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.
Saul Bellow – [Arts and Artists]
Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.
Saul Bellow – [Oppression]
Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.
Saul Bellow – [Goodness]
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.
Saul Bellow – [Psychoanalysis]
The fact that there are so many weak, poor and boring stories and novels written and published in America has been ascribed by our rebels to the horrible squareness of our institutions, the idiocy of power, the debasement of sexual instincts, and the failure of writers to be alienated enough. The poems and novels of these same rebellious spirits, and their theoretical statements, are grimy and gritty and very boring too, besides being nonsensical, and it is evident by now that polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art either.
Saul Bellow – [Poetry and Poets]
There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever… money, for instance, or war.
Saul Bellow – [Evil]