574 Quotes by Saul Bellow

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

No true individual has existed yet, able to live, able to die. Only diseased, tragic, or dismal and ludicrous fools who sometimes hoped to achieve some ideal by fiat, by their great desire for it. But usually by bullying all mankind into believing them.

What did Danton lose his head for, or why was there a Napoleon, if it wasn't to make a nobility of us all?

The noise of the world is so terrible that we can endure it only by being coated with sleep.

New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn't come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it.

But when the things that happen pour over everyone alike, then we can really see who is better and who's worse.

Some powerful magnificence not human in other words, seemed under me. And it was the same mild pink colour, like the water of a watermelon, that did it. At once I recognised the importance of this, as throughout my life I had known these moments when the dumb begin to speak, when I hear the voices of objects and colours; then the physical universe starts to wrinkle and change and heave and rise and smooth, so it seems even the dogs have to lean against a tree, shivering.

As for Sono, she was trying to instruct him, to show how a man should treat a woman. The pride of the peacock, the lust of the goat, and the wrath of the lion are the glory and wisdom of God.

The Indian temperament is so excitable, you know.