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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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Saul Bellow
Age: 89 †
Born: 1915
Born: June 10
Died: 2005
Died: April 5
Author
Essayist
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Solomon Bellows
Life
Emptiness
Center
Form
Nothing
Kind

More quotes by Saul Bellow

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The stillness in art characterizes prayer, and the eye of the storm.
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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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Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn't know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you're picking up the pieces -- down to the last glassy splinter.
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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A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.
Saul Bellow
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It seems, after all that there are no nonpeculiar people.
Saul Bellow
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How should I know why! I didn't invent human beings, Iggy.
Saul Bellow
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A writer is a reader moved to emulation.
Saul Bellow
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People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.
Saul Bellow
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... an era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age.
Saul Bellow
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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.
Saul Bellow
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Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can't open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated.
Saul Bellow
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We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it - the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.
Saul Bellow
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The main reason for rewriting is not to achieve a smooth surface, but to discover the inner truth of your characters.
Saul Bellow
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I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.
Saul Bellow
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I’ve had all the monstrosity I want.
Saul Bellow
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Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
Saul Bellow
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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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The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business.
Saul Bellow
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I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.
Saul Bellow