“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?”

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.