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I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

Saul Bellow

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Saul Bellow
Age: 89 †
Born: 1915
Born: June 10
Died: 2005
Died: April 5
Author
Essayist
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Solomon Bellows
Arrest
Distraction
Midst
Attention
Art
Something
Think

More quotes by Saul Bellow

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Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.
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It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.
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A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
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I've discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.'
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The stillness in art characterizes prayer, and the eye of the storm.
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Death deserves dignity.
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Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.
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Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.
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A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.
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Art is order, made out of the chaos of life.
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Also, he was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage it is harder to find out how he feels.
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... unless you made your life a turning point, there was no reason for existing.
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People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
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The writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he [or she] can at times come between the madly distracted and the distractions.
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The hour that burst the spirit's sleep.
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I don't like to write from a flat, cold position. You must like what you're doing very much or like the people -- either like them or hate them. You can't be indifferent.
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With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.
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I'm afraid there's nothing we can do about the journalists we can only hope that they will die off as the deerflies do towards the end of August.
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Live or die but don't poison everything.
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Each man has his own batch of poems.
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