574 Quotes by Saul Bellow

He chased ruin and death even harder than he had chased women. He blew his talent and his health and reached home, the grave, in a dusty slide.

Of course! Easily or not at all. People were mad to be knocking themselves out over difficulties because they thought difficulty was a sign of the right thing.

Everybody is busy. Every man turns himself into a whole corporation to handle the business.

Beauty is not a human invention.

So many questions impossible to answer could not be asked about an honest man. Nor perhaps about a sane man.

Nobody should pretend to be always one hundred per cent honest. I wish I knew how to be seventy, sixty per cent.” I swore she must be one hundred and ten, two hundred.

You take too many pills of every kind – first stimulants and then depressants, anodynes followed by analeptics, until the poor organism doesn’t know what’s happened.

My next idea was how nothing was more dreadful than to be forced by another to feel his persuasion as to how horrible it is to exist, how deathly to hope, and taste the same despair. How of all the impositions this was the worst imposition. Not just to be as they make you but to feel as they dictate. If you didn’t have the strongest alliance you surely would despair at last and your mouth would drink blood.

Thoughts should be real. Words should have a definite meanings and a man should believe what he said.