Saul Bellow

“Well, there is a piece of famous advice, grand advice even if it is German, to forget what you can't bear. The strong can forget, can shut out history. Very good. Even if it is self-flattery to speak of strength--these aesthetic philosophers, they take a posture, but power sweeps postures away. Still, it's true you can't go on transposing one nightmare into another, Nietzsche was certainly right about that. The tender-minded must harden themselves. Is this world nothing but a barren lump of coke? No, no, but what sometimes seems a system of prevention, a denial of what every human being knows. I love my children, but I am the world to them, and bring them nightmares. I had this child by my enemy. And I love her. The sight of her, the odor of her hair, this minute, makes me tremble with love. Isn't it mysterious how I love the child of my enemy? But a man doesn't need happiness for himself. No, he can put up with any amount of torment--with recollections, with his own familiar evils, despair. And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning.”

“If you could have confidence in nature you would not have to fear. It would keep you up. Creative is nature. Rapid. Lavish. Inspirational. It shapes leaves. It rolls the waters of the earth. Man is the chief of this. All creations are his just inheritance. You don't know what you've got within you. A person either creates or he destroys. There is no neutrality.”

“Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.”

“Just then his state of being was so curious that he was compelled , himself, to see it -- eager, grieving, fantastic, dangerous, crazed and, to the point of death, "comical." It was enough to make a man pray to God to remove this great, bone-breaking burden of selfhood and self-development, give himself, a failure, back to the species for a primitive cure.”

“Everybody wants to have intimate conversations, but the smart fellows don't give out, only the fools. The smart fellows talk intimately about the fools, and examine them all over and give them advice.”

“You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.”

“He knew what retributions your devils are liable to bring for the way you treat your wife and women or behave while your father is on his deathbed, what you ought to think of your pleasure, of acting like a cockroach; he had the intelligence for the comparison. He had the intelligence to be sublime. But sublimity can't exist only as a special gift of the few, due to an accident of origin, like being born an albino. If it were, what interest would we have in it?”

“In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.”

“Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there’s the devil to pay.”

“Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.”

“Conquered people tend to be witty.”

“The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether.”

“I discovered, however, in the early days of our marriage that, in having her way, she put my interests ahead of her own.”

“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”

“I venture to say Kierkegaard meant that truth has lost its force with us and horrible pain and evil must teach it to us again, the eternal punishments of Hell will have to regain their reality before mankind turns serious once more. I do not see this. Let us set aside the fact that such convictions in the mouths of safe, comfortable people playing at crisis, alienation, apocalypse and desperation, make me sick. We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and th rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines. Things are grim enough without these shivery games. People frightening one another--a poor sort of moral exercise. But, to get to the main point, the advocacy and praise of suffering take us in the wrong direction and those of us who remain loyal to civilization must not go for it. You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.”

“I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.”

“As the wicked flee when none pursueth, so does the middle-class wrestle when none contendeth. They cried out for freedom, it came down on them in a flood. Nothing remains but a few floating timbers of psychotherapy.”

“There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever... money, for instance, or war.”

“Happiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.”

“סיפוריו של הסופר היהודי־אמריקאי הגדול, חתן פרס נובל, מספקים עדות מיוחדת במינה, אם לא על הגורל היהודי במאה ה – 20 הרי על חלק נכבד מגורל זה שהתרחש בארצות הברית. נקודת המבט של בלו מרתקת כיוון שהוא מעלה שורה של תהיות הנוגעות למעבר התרבותי הדרמטי של המהגרים היהודיים המזרח־אירופאיים בראשית המאה שעברה אל ארץ האפשרויות הבלתי מוגבלות.”