Saul Bellow

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.

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

We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next.

In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries.

Conquered people tend to be witty.

I'm glad I haven't lived in vain.

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

Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it - they should, because they put it all in beforehand.

Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.

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

There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

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

No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

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

California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that.

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

A man is only as good as what he loves.

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.

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

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