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Saul Bellow: 206 quotes111 likes

“Reading Decline of the West I learned that in Spengler’s view ours was a Faustian civilization and that we, the Jews, were Magians, the survivors and representatives of an earlier type, totally incapable of comprehending the Faustian spirit that had created the great civilization of the West. … What Magians were to Faustians, Faustians might very well be to Americans.”

Part I, p. 26
A Jewish Writer in America (2011)

“The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, “Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist?” The keen old prof replied, “And who is asking?””

Humboldt’s Gift (1996), p. 163
General sources

“A millennial belief in a Holy God may have the effect of deepening the soul, but it is also obviously archaic, and modern influences would presently bring me up to date and reveal how antiquated my origins were. To turn away from those origins, however, has always seemed to me an utter impossibility. It would be a treason to my first consciousness to un-Jew myself.”

Part I, p. 26
A Jewish Writer in America (2011)

“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. It's like an Easter Egg hunt.”

Saul Bellow book The Dean's December

The Dean's December (1982), ch. 18, p. 298
General sources

“Apparently the rise of consciousness is linked to certain kinds of privation. It is the bitterness of self-consciousness that we knowers know best. Critical of the illusions that sustained mankind in earlier times, this self-consciousness of ours does little to sustain us now. The question is: which is disenchanted, the world itself or the consciousness we have of it?”

"A Matter of the Soul" (1975), pp. 75-76
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.”

Source: Introduction to The Closing of the American Mind (1988), p. 15

“It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything could be more exciting than the times themselves. What we read daily and view on the TV has thrust imagined forms into the shadow. We are staggeringly rich in facts, in things, and perhaps, like the nouveau riche of other ages, we want our wealth faithfully reproduced by the artist.”

"Facts That Put Fancy to Flight" (1962), p. 67
It All Adds Up (1994)

“No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.”

Saul Bellow book Humboldt's Gift

Humboldt's Gift (1975), p. 452
General sources

“When we read the best nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists, we soon realize that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a definition of human nature, to justify the continuation of life as well as the writing of novels.”

"The Sealed Treasure" (1960), p. 60
It All Adds Up (1994)

“A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become.”

"Cousins," from Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984), p. 263
General sources

“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)
General sources

“I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”

Saul Bellow book The Adventures of Augie March

Source: The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Ch. 1 (opening line)

“It's hard for writers to get on with their work if they are convinced that they owe a concrete debt to experience and cannot allow themselves the privilege of ranging freely through social classes and professional specialties. A certain pride in their own experience, perhaps a sense of the property rights of others in their experience, holds them back.”

"Facts That Put Fancy to Flight" (1962), p. 68
It All Adds Up (1994)

“What is art but a way of seeing?”

Thomas Berger, in Being Invisible (1967)
Misattributed

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

"Saul Bellow: Treading on the Toes of the Brahmans," interview with Lawrence Grobel in Endangered Species: Writers Talk about Their Craft, Their Visions, Their Lives [Da Capo, 2001, ISBN ISBN 0-306-81004-2], p. 21
General sources

“Pointless but intense excitement holds us in TV dramas. We hear threatening music. A killer with a gun steals into the bedroom of a sleeping woman. More subliminal sounds of danger, pointlessly ominous. The woman wakes and runs into the kitchen for a knife. The cops are on the case. We watch as the criminal is pursued through night streets; shots, a death; a body falls from a roof. Then time is up, another drama begins. Now we are in a church. No, we are in a lecture hall; no again — a drawer opens in a morgue. A woman is looking for her kidnapped child. Then that ends, and we are on the veld with zebras and giraffes. Then with Lenin at a mass meeting. And suddenly we flash away to a cooking school; we are shown how to stuff a turkey. Next the Berlin Wall comes down. Or flags are burning. Or a panel is worrying about the rug crisis. More and more public themes, with less and less personal consciousness. Clearly, personal consciousness is shrinking.”

"The Distracted Public" (1990), pp. 159-160
It All Adds Up (1994)

“People reserve their best thinking for their professional specialties and, next in line, for serious matters confronting the alert citizen —economics, politics, the disposal of nuclear waste, etc. The day’s work done, they want to be entertained.”

Source: Introduction to The Closing of the American Mind (1988), p. 16

“We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.”

Saul Bellow book Herzog

Herzog (1964) [Penguin Classics, 2003, ISBN 0-142-43729-8], p. 82
General sources

“The university, in a society ruled by public opinion, was to have been an island of intellectual freedom where all views were investigated without restriction. … But by consenting to play an active or “positive,” a participatory role in society, the university has become inundated and saturated with the backflow of society’s “problems.” Preoccupied with questions of Health, Sex, Race, War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes. … Any proposed reforms of liberal education which might bring the university into conflict with the whole of the U. S. A. are unthinkable. Increasingly, the people “inside” are identical in their appetites and motives with the people “outside” the university.”

Source: Introduction to The Closing of the American Mind (1988), p. 18

“Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.”

Saul Bellow book Humboldt's Gift

Humboldt's Gift (1975), p. 265
General sources