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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 quotes111 likes

Saul Bellow Quotes

“Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.”

Saul Bellow book The Adventures of Augie March

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

“One’s language is a spiritual location. It houses your soul. If you were born in America all essential communication, your deepest conversations with yourself, will be in English. … Your English is the principal instrument of your humanity.”

Saul Bellow

Part I, p. 27
A Jewish Writer in America (2011)

“As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting — the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.”

Saul Bellow book The Adventures of Augie March

Source: The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Ch. 6

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

Saul Bellow

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

“Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole.”

Saul Bellow

"The Distracted Public" (1990), p. 159
It All Adds Up (1994)

“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.”

Saul Bellow

Part II, p. 29
A Jewish Writer in America (2011)

“One naturally regrets not being an expert or one of those insiders who thoroughly understand. It's hell to be an amateur. A little reflection calms your sorrow, however. The experts in their own little speedboat, the rest of us floating with the rest of mankind in a great barge — that is the picture.”

Saul Bellow

"The Day They Signed the Treaty" (1979), p. 224
It All Adds Up (1994)

“Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.”

Saul Bellow

"The Jefferson Lectures" (1977), p. 139
It All Adds Up (1994)

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

Saul Bellow

"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.”

Saul Bellow

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 <br class="br">Misattributed <br class="br">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 <br class="br">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

“Tocqueville predicted that in democratic countries the public would demand larger and larger doses of excitement and increasingly stronger stimulants from its writers. He probably did not expect that public to dramatize itself so extensively, to make the world scene everybody's theatre, or, in the developed countries, to take to alcohol and drugs in order to get relief from the horrors of ceaseless intensity, the torment of thrills and distractions. A great many writers have done little more than meet the mounting demand for thrills. I think that this demand has, in the language of marketing, peaked.”

Saul Bellow

"The Distracted Public" (1990)
It All Adds Up (1994)

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

Saul Bellow

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

“Our media make crisis chatter out of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing — a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the U. N., the financial collapse of New York. We can't avoid being politicized (a word as murky as the condition which it describes) because it is necessary after all to know what is going on. Worse yet, what is going on will not let us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations, the insidious platitudes of the media (tormenting because the underlying realities are so large and so terrible), can be screened out. The study of literature itself is heavily "politicized."”

Saul Bellow

To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976) [Viking/Penguin, 1998, ISBN 0-141-18075-7], p. 21
General sources

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

Saul Bellow

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

“In politics continental Europe was infantile — horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer.”

Saul Bellow

"My Paris" (1983), p. 235
It All Adds Up (1994)

“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

“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.”

Saul Bellow

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

“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

“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.”

Saul Bellow

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

“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.”

Saul Bellow

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

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

Saul Bellow

"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?”

Saul Bellow

Thomas Berger, in Being Invisible (1967)
Misattributed

“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.”

Saul Bellow

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

“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)

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

Saul Bellow

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.”

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

"The Sealed Treasure" (1960), p. 60
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

“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.”

Saul Bellow

"Facts That Put Fancy to Flight" (1962), p. 67
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.”

Saul Bellow

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

“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?”

Saul Bellow

"A Matter of the Soul" (1975), pp. 75-76
It All Adds Up (1994)

“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