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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
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Predict
Fellow
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More quotes by 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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Death deserves dignity.
Saul Bellow
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You're all alone when you're a writer. Sometimes you just feel you need a humanity bath. Even a ride on the subway will do that. But it's much more interesting to talk about books. After all, that's what life used to be for writers: they talk books, politics, history, America. Nothing has replaced that.
Saul Bellow
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It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality.
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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It's goodbye to reality when love sets in.
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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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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A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.
Saul Bellow
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I must play the instrument I've got.
Saul Bellow
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It is wrong to turn a man (a subject) into a thing (an object). By means of spiritual dialogue, the I-It relationship becomes an I-Thou relationship. God comes and goes in man's soul. And men come and go in each other's souls. Sometimes they come and go in each other's beds, too.
Saul Bellow
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One of the booby traps of freedom - which is bordered on all sides by isolation - is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life's banquet.
Saul Bellow
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With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything.
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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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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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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Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees.
Saul Bellow
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How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants the opinion of a group?
Saul Bellow
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Hapiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.
Saul Bellow
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Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it - they should, because they put it all in beforehand.
Saul Bellow