02UndatedMany common lies and hypocrisies are like that, just out of the harmony of the moment.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
03UndatedWhenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
05UndatedA man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
06UndatedNew York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn't come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
07UndatedPeople don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
08UndatedBoredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
09UndatedSome big insect flew in and began walking on the table. I don’t know what insect it was, but it was brown, shining, and rich in structures. In the city the big universal chain of insects gets thin, but where there’s a leaf or two it’ll be represented.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
10UndatedI think that New York is not the cultural centre of America but the business and administrative centre of American culture.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
11UndatedAlternatives and particularly desirable alternatives grow only on imaginary trees.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
12UndatedThe truth is we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
13UndatedThere is today an extraordinary interest with the data of modern experience per se. Our absorption in our contemporary historical state is very high right now. It's not altogether unlike a similar situation in seventeenth century Holland where wealthy merchants wanted their portraits done with all their blemishes included. It is the height of egotism in a sense to think even one's blemishes are of significance. So today Americans seem to want their writers to reveal all their weaknesses their meannesses to celebrate their very confusions. And they want it in the most direct possible way - they want it served up neat as it were without the filtering and generalizing power of fiction.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
14UndatedAll a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
15UndatedOur society like decadent Rome has turned into an amusement society with writers chief among the court jesters - not so much above the clatter as part of it.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
16UndatedI have always had a weakness for footnotes. For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a text. And I see that I am now using a long footnote to open a serious subject - shifting in a quick move to Paris, to a penthouse in the Hotel Crillon. Early June. Breakfast time. The host is my good friend Professor Ravelstein, Abe Ravelstein. My wife and I, also staying at the Crillon, have a room below, on the sixth floor. She is still asleep. The entire floor below ours (this is not absolutely relevant but somehow I can't avoid mentioning it) is occupied just now by Michael Jackson and his entourage. He performs nightly in some vast Parisian auditorium. Very soon his French fans will arrive and a crowd of faces will be turned upward, shouting in unison, 'Miekell Jack-sown'. A police barrier holds the fans back. Inside, from the sixth floor, when you look down the marble stairwell you see Michael's bodyguards. One of them is doing the crossword puzzle in the 'Paris Herald'.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
17UndatedWie Gott in Frankreich'' was the expression used by the Jews of Eastern Europe to describe perfect happiness. I puzzled over this simile for many years, and I think I can interpret it now. God would be perfectly happy in France because he would not be troubled by prayers, observances, blessings and demands for the interpretation of difficult dietary questions. Surrounded by unbelievers He too could relax toward evening, just as thousands of Parisians do at their favorite cafes. There are few things more pleasant, more civilized than a tranquil terrasse at dusk.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
18UndatedHappiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
