574 Quotes by Saul Bellow

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you’ve fallen into good hands – someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

Keep out of this, please, will you, Mildred? A child isn’t a toy.” “Oh,” she said, “they grow up. Time does it more than fathers and mothers. The parents take too much credit.

One of the booby traps of freedom – which is bordered on all sides by isolation – is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life’s banquet.

I’m deprived of my children.” Wilhelm bit his lip. It was too late to turn away. The anguish struck him. “I pay and pay. I never see them. They grow up without me. She makes them like herself. She’ll bring them up to be my enemies.

But she’s a nut, and nuts win.

He looked down through the green transparency to the stony bottom webbed with golden lines. Never still. If his soul could cast a reflection so briljant, and so intensely sweet, he might beg God to make such use of him. But that would be too childish. The actual sphere is not clear like this, but turbulent, angry. A vast human action is going on. Death watches. So if you have some happiness, conceal it. And when your heart is full, keep your mouth shut also.

And I’m convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.

Human character is smaller now, people don’t have durable passions; they’ve replaced passions with excitement.

But when he sat down for a moment on the bed, all the comedy of it was snatched away and torn to pieces. He was wrong about the woman’s expression: he was trying to transform it into something he could bear. The truth was probably far different. He had started out to see what had happened with her eyes and had ended by substituting his own, thus contriving to put her on his side.