Saul Bellow

"If you could have confidence in nature you would not have to fear. It would keep you up. Creative is nature. Rapid. Lavish. Inspirational. It shapes leaves. It rolls the waters of the earth. Man is the chief of this. All creations are his just inheritance. You don't know what you've got within you. A person either creates or he destroys. There is no neutrality."

"Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is."

"It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn't have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal parts. Then it was in the line of human advance that Einhorn could do so much."

"One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away."

"If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog."

"What is art but a way of seeing?"

"When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice."

"Happiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions."

"Wie Gott in Frankreich'' was the expression used by the Jews of Eastern Europe to describe perfect happiness. I puzzled over this simile for many years, and I think I can interpret it now. God would be perfectly happy in France because he would not be troubled by prayers, observances, blessings and demands for the interpretation of difficult dietary questions. Surrounded by unbelievers He too could relax toward evening, just as thousands of Parisians do at their favorite cafes. There are few things more pleasant, more civilized than a tranquil terrasse at dusk."

"Our society like decadent Rome has turned into an amusement society with writers chief among the court jesters - not so much above the clatter as part of it."

"All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac."

"There is today an extraordinary interest with the data of modern experience per se. Our absorption in our contemporary historical state is very high right now. It's not altogether unlike a similar situation in seventeenth century Holland where wealthy merchants wanted their portraits done with all their blemishes included. It is the height of egotism in a sense to think even one's blemishes are of significance. So today Americans seem to want their writers to reveal all their weaknesses their meannesses to celebrate their very confusions. And they want it in the most direct possible way - they want it served up neat as it were without the filtering and generalizing power of fiction."

"The truth is we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience."

"Alternatives and particularly desirable alternatives grow only on imaginary trees."

"I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America but the business and administrative centre of American culture."

"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."

"A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him."

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

"The sun was shut up in a cold bottle."

"The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop."