Quotes by Saul Bellow

• What is art but a way of seeing?
• People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
• In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries.
• In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.
• No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.
• She was what we used to call a suicide blonde - dyed by her own hand.
• There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever... money, for instance, or war.
• 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.
• You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
• 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.
• If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.
• When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
• Conquered people tend to be witty.
• We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next.
• Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.
• California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that.
• There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.
• A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out.
• A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.
• A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
• A man is only as good as what he loves.
• A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
• Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
• Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.
• I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side.
• Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.
• Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.
• Hapiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.
• I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.
• I'm glad I haven't lived in vain.
• All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.