Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellowwas a Canadian-American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 June 1915
CityLachine, Canada
CountryUnited States of America
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.
A writer is in the broadest sense a spokesman of his community. Through him that community comes to know its heart. Without such knowledge, how long can it survive?
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...
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.
reality comes from giving an account of yourself. (Augie March)
She was what we used to call a suicide blond - dyed by her own hand.
There is something terribly nervous-making about a modern existence. For one thing, it's all the thinking we have to do and all the judgments we have to make. It's the price of freedom: make the judgments, make the mental calls,
Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep.
People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.
What is art but a way of seeing?
Happiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance.
I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.
Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real--the here-and-now. Seize the day.