“And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish. We would need no personal names of the old sort in the sidereal future, nothing being fixed. We would be designated by other nouns. Days and nights would belong to the museums. The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery. The seas powdering our bones like quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good - a melancholy good.”

Canadian and American writer

Saul Bellow was a Canadian and American writer whose work made him one of the central figures in 20th century fiction. He lived from 1915 to 2005 and was recognized with major literary honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to have won the National Book Award for Fiction three times, and in 1990 he received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. His reputation rests on fiction that probes modern life, identity, and the pressures placed on individuals by society and thought.