574 Quotes by Saul Bellow

Everybody wants to have intimate conversations, but the smart fellows don’t give out, only the fools. The smart fellows talk intimately about the fools, and examine them all over and give them advice.

And when I say that he lost his head, what I mean is not that his judgement abandoned him but that his enthusiasms and visions swept him far out.

If energy is delight and exuberance is beauty, the manic depressive knows more about life than anyone else. Didn’t Freud say happiness was nothing more than the remission of pain? So, the more pain, the intenser the happiness.

If love is love, it’s free.

Was she not so simple and free of ulterior motives as she looked? Well, neither was I.

Seashores are good for madmen – provided they’re not too mad.

Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can’t understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves.

I am giving up the violin. I guess I will never reach my object through it,” to raise my spirit from the earth, to leave the body of this death. I was very stubborn. I wanted to raise myself into another world. My life and deeds were a prison.

If this was so, I was sunk, for by now I was more in love than I could stand, as if some mineral had got into my veins and arteries and I ached, flesh and bones, the way you will on the verge of the grippe.