Saul Bellow

I am money’s medium. It passes through me— taxes, insurance, mortgage, child support, rent, legal fees. All this dignified blundering costs plenty.

She transformed his miseries into sexual excitements and, to give credit where it was due, turned his grief in a useful direction.

What 1 seem to do, thought Herzog, is to inflame myself with my drama, with ridicule, failure, denunciation, distortion, to inflame myself voluptuously, esthetically, until I reach sexual climax. And that climax looks like a resolution and an answer to many “higher" problems.

For when will we civilized beings become really serious? said Kierkegaard. Only when we have known hell through and through. Without this, hedonism and frivolity will diffuse hell through all our days.

It all goes back to those German existentialists who tell you how good dread is for you, how it saves you from distraction and gives you your freedom and makes you authentic. God is no more. But Death is.

To him, perpetual thought of death was a sin. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

The worst of all deceptions is self-deception.

The part can never be well unless the whole is well.

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

There was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want! It happened every afternoon, and when I tried to suppress it got even stronger.

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 expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries.

She was what we used to call a suicide blond — dyed by her own hand.

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

A fool can throw a stone in a pond that a 100 wise men can’t get out.

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

Fiction is the higher autobiography.

A writer is a reader moved to emulation.

Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity.

you have to get a feeling that you’ve fallen into good hands— someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is great.

Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm … an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

Every writer’s assumption is that he is as other human beings are, and that they are more or less as he is. There’s a principle of psychic unity. [Writing] was not meant to be an occult operation; it was not meant to be an esoteric secret.

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

A character has his own logic. He goes his way, one goes with him; he has some perceptions, one perceives them with him. You do him justice; you don’t grind your own axe.