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
Art -- the fresh feeling, new harmony, the transforming magic which by means of myth brings back the scattered distracted soul from its modern chaos -- art, not politics, is the remedy.
She's very pretty but she's honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won't spread.
I mean you have been disappointed in love, but don't you know how many things there are to be disappointed in besides love? You are lucky to be still disappointed in love. Later it may be even more terrible.
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.
And what about all the good I have in my heart - does it mean anything?
My face too blind, my mind too limited, my instincts too narrow. But this intensity, doesn't it mean anything?
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.
In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While in the parlors of indignation the right-thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil. (p. 51)
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?