Saul Bellow

"You never have to change anything you get up in the middle of the night to write."

"I should have written you a letter, it was too late to make the deaths of my brothers an excuse. Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful answer is that while I can gear myself up to do a novel, letters, real-life communications, are too much for me. I used to rattle them off easily enough; why is the challenge of writing to friends and acquaintances too much for me now? Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away."

"Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door."

"I am not an ornithologist—I am a bird."

"At times I feel like a socket that remembers its tooth."

"“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”"

"Some people embrace their gifts with gratitude. Others have no use for them and can think only of overcoming their weaknesses. Only their defects interest and challenge them. Thus those who hate people may seek them out. Misanthropes often practice psychiatry. The shy become performers. Natural thieves look for positions of trust. The frightened make bold moves."

"People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned."

"There is no limit to the amount of intelligence invested in ignorance when the need for illusion runs deep."

"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write."

"I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses."

"The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether."

"A man may say, "From now on I'm going to speak the truth." But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking."

"A man is only as good as what he loves."

"It's usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart."