Saul Bellow Quotes

1915–2005 Canada

Saul Bellow (10 June 1915 – 5 April 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 and the National Medal of Arts in 1988.

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Also known as: Bellow, Saul

Random Saul Bellow quote

59 quotes

What is imposed on us by birth and environment is what we are called upon to overcome.

A Jewish Writer in America (2011)

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

The #1 New York Times Bestseller (1992)

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

There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul.

Foreword to The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (1987)

It is risky in a book of ideas to speak in one’s own voice, but it reminds us that the sources of the truest truths are inevitably profoundly personal.

Introduction to The Closing of the American Mind (1988)

The sounds of junk culture are heard over a ground bass of extremism. Our entertainments swarm with specters of world crisis. Nothing moderate can have any claim to our attention.

It All Adds Up (1994)

The book of the world, so richly studied by autodidacts, is being closed by the “learned,” who are raising walls of opinions to shut the world out.

Introduction to The Closing of the American Mind (1988)

All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!

Henderson the Rain King (1959)

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970)

Any artist should be grateful for a naïve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Foreword to The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (1987)

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

Humboldt's Gift (1975)

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

There are evils, as someone has pointed out, that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever — money, for instance, or war.

The Dean’s December (1982)

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches.

The Portable Curmudgeon (1987)

We are free to withdraw (to withdraw our minds where we cannot withdraw our bodies) from situations in which our humanity or lack of it is defined for us.

A Jewish Writer in America (2011)

I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, "To hell with you."

Conquered people tend to be witty.

Mr. Sammler's Planet (1976)

Enlightenment should also be enjoyable.

his Introduction to The Closing of the American Mind (1988)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Saul Bellow (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.