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... a fellow can't predict what he will pick up in the form of influence.

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
Fellow
Fellows
Pick
Picks
Influence
Form
Predict

More quotes by Saul Bellow

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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.'
Saul Bellow
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The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas which frequently deny its very existence, and which indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether.
Saul Bellow
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There was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want! It happened every afternoon, and when I tried to suppress it it got even stronger.
Saul Bellow
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We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.
Saul Bellow
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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.
Saul Bellow
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In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too
Saul Bellow
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The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business.
Saul Bellow
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Retirement is an illusion. Not a reward but a mantrap. The bankrupt underside of success. A shortcut to death. Golf courses are too much like cemeteries.
Saul Bellow
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Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.
Saul Bellow
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To tell the truth I never had it so good. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy.
Saul Bellow
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A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.
Saul Bellow
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The sand swallows burst out of their scupper holes in the bluffs and out over the transparent drown of the water, back again to the white, to the brown, to the black, from moving to stock-still sand waves and water-worked woods and roots that hugged and twisted in the sun.
Saul Bellow
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I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.
Saul Bellow
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At moments I dislike having a face, a nose, lips, because he has them.
Saul Bellow
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All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination.
Saul Bellow
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I’ve had all the monstrosity I want.
Saul Bellow
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There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.
Saul Bellow
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There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.
Saul Bellow
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I want to tell you, don't marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it's adultery.
Saul Bellow
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When I didn't argue he was satisfied he had persuaded me, and was not the first to make that mistake.
Saul Bellow