Saul Bellow Quotes
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Saul Bellow was a Canadian-American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited "the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age." His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Bellow was widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors.Bellow said that of all his characters, Eugene Henderson, of Henderson the Rain King, was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle "to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses." Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Albert Corde, the dean in The Dean's December, called "the big-scale insanities of the 20th century." This transcendence of the "unutterably dismal" is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a "ferocious assimilation of learning" and an emphasis on nobility. Wikipedia  

✵ 10. June 1915 – 5. April 2005   •   Other names سال بلو, სოლ ბელოუ
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Saul Bellow: 103   quotes 111   likes

Saul Bellow Quotes

“Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.”

Attributed in Fun Fitness for Families (2005) by James Steffen, p. 24 and later publications; also attributed to Helmut Schmidt, in The 7 Ultimate Secrets to Weight Loss (2011) by Natasa Denman, p. 31 and later publications.
Disputed

“Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.”

"The Sealed Treasure" (1960), p. 62
It All Adds Up (1994)

“If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.”

If women are to have the same duties as men, they must have the same nurture and education. — Plato, The Republic, Book V, trans. Benjamin Jowett, third edition, Oxford University Press, 1892 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/HTML.php?recordID=0345#hd_lf131.3.head.017
Misattributed
Variant: So if we are going to use men and women for the same purposes, they must be taught the same things. The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee [Penguin Classics, 2003, ISBN 0-140-449140-0], p. 161
Variant: Then if we are to use the women for the same things as the men, we must teach them the same things. The Republic, trans. W. H. D. Rouse [Signet Classic, 1999, ISBN 0-451-52745-3], p. 249

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

Part I, p. 28
A Jewish Writer in America (2011)

“We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans — convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.”

" A Second Half Life" (1991), p. 324
It All Adds Up (1994)

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

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

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

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

“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

“What is art but a way of seeing?”

Thomas Berger, in Being Invisible (1967)
Misattributed

“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

“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

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

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