Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “What Homo sapien imagines, he may slowly convert himself to.”

— Saul Bellow

52. “Let the enemies of life step down.”

— Saul Bellow

53. “Well, everybody has a history.”

— Saul Bellow

54. “I must play the instrument I’ve got.”

— Saul Bellow

55. “A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.”

— Saul Bellow

56. “For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.”

— Saul Bellow

57. “How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants the opinion of a group?”

— Saul Bellow

58. “With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you’ve fallen into good hands – someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.”

— Saul Bellow

59. “My face too blind, my mind too limited, my instincts too narrow. But this intensity, doesn’t it mean anything?”

— Saul Bellow

60. “A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.”

— Saul Bellow

61. “It seems, after all that there are no nonpeculiar people.”

— Saul Bellow

62. “Imagination is a force of nature.”

— Saul Bellow

63. “Love is the most potent cosmetic...”

— Saul Bellow

64. “If I had a child of school age, I would send him to one of the Waldorf Schools.”

— Saul Bellow

65. “The paltriness of these sexual struggles.”

— Saul Bellow

66. “First these people murdered you, then they forced you to brood over their crimes.”

— Saul Bellow

67. “But it’s a tiresome preoccupation, self-esteem. Something has to be done to limit the number of people whose opinions can affect us.”

— Saul Bellow

68. “I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do about the journalists; we can only hope that they will die off as the deerflies do towards the end of August.”

— Saul Bellow

69. “In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries.”

— Saul Bellow

70. “Facts always are sensational.”

— Saul Bellow

71. “I am not an ornithologist – I am a bird.”

— Saul Bellow

72. “I am a phoenix who runs after arsonists.”

— Saul Bellow

73. “A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him.”

— Saul Bellow

74. “What do women really want? They eat green salad and drink human blood.”

— Saul Bellow

75. “Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.”

— Saul Bellow

76. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be happy to read them.”

— Saul Bellow

77. “If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.”

— Saul Bellow

78. “Unfortunately for the betterment of mankind it is not always the fair-minded who are in the right.”

— Saul Bellow

79. “I’ve never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn’t have a price tag on the other side.”

— Saul Bellow

80. “No school without spectacular eccentrics and crazy hearts is worth attending.”

— Saul Bellow

81. “There was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want! It happened every afternoon, and when I tried to suppress it it got even stronger.”

— Saul Bellow

82. “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.”

— Saul Bellow

83. “We mustn’t forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.”

— Saul Bellow

84. “All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!”

— Saul Bellow

85. “For God’s sake,′ the dog is saying, ’open the universe a little more!”

— Saul Bellow

86. “Live or die but don’t poison everything.”

— Saul Bellow

87. “We are funny creatures. We don’t see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects, but endless fire.”

— Saul Bellow

88. “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.”

— Saul Bellow

89. “Humankind struggles with collective powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul.”

— Saul Bellow

90. “Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.”

— Saul Bellow

91. “The body, she says, is subject to the force of gravity. But the soul is ruled by levity, pure.”

— Saul Bellow

92. “Erotic practices have become diversified. Sex used to be a single-crop farming, like cotton or wheat; now people raise all kinds of things.”

— Saul Bellow

93. “People don’t realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.”

— Saul Bellow

94. “A person either creates or destroys. There is no neutrality.”

— Saul Bellow

95. “The hour that burst the spirit’s sleep...”

— Saul Bellow

96. “I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally.”

— Saul Bellow

97. “Also, he was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage; it is harder to find out how he feels.”

— Saul Bellow

98. “I don’t like to write from a flat, cold position. You must like what you’re doing very much or like the people – either like them or hate them. You can’t be indifferent.”

— Saul Bellow

99. “She was what we used to call a suicide blonde – dyed by her own hand.”

— Saul Bellow

100. “It’s goodbye to reality when love sets in.”

— Saul Bellow