Saul Bellow

A person either creates or destroys. There is no neutrality.

— Saul Bellow

“You never know what forms self-respect will take, especially with people whose rules of life are few.”

— Saul Bellow

I am something of a crank about sleep, for if I get seven and a quarter hours instead of eight I feel…

— Saul Bellow

De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for…

— Saul Bellow

“Still women- women. They do themselves more credit, there's more reality in women. They live closer to their nature. They have to.…

— Saul Bellow

“If love is love, it's free.”

— Saul Bellow

“Now: the first requirement of stability in a human being was that the said human being should really desire to exist. This…

— Saul Bellow

“But it was the figure you cut as an employee, on an employee's footing with the girls, in work clothes, and being…

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

I have begun in old age to understand...that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how…

— Saul Bellow

“Oh, God,” Wilhelm prayed, “Let me out of my trouble. Let me out of my thoughts, and let me do something better…

— Saul Bellow

Facts always are sensational.

— Saul Bellow

In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't mean the criminals. For them we…

— Saul Bellow

The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the…

— Saul Bellow

To tell the truth I never had it so good. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy.

— Saul Bellow

It is a joy to be choked with thought.

— Saul Bellow

“He wondered at times whether he didn’t belong to a class of people secretly convinced they had an arrangement with fate; in…

— Saul Bellow

You're all alone when you're a writer. Sometimes you just feel you need a humanity bath. Even a ride on the subway…

— Saul Bellow

“John Hawkes is an extraordinary writer. I have always admired his books. They should he more widely read.”

— Saul Bellow

I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer…

— Saul Bellow

I've discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to…

— Saul Bellow

“With his friends, an egotist. With love, lazy. With brightness, dull. With power, passive. With his own soul, evasive.”

— Saul Bellow

Well, everybody has a history.

— Saul Bellow

Each man has his own batch of poems.

— Saul Bellow

“It was the middle-class female solidarity, defending a nice girl from charges of calculation and viciousness. Nice girls marry for love. But…

— Saul Bellow