Saul Bellow Quotes

“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.”
― Saul Bellow, Seize the Day

“Offered a job as book critic for Time magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely informed by Chambers that there was no place for him at the magazine. Bellow had often wondered, he told us, what he ought to have said. I suggested that he might have got the job if he'd replied that Wordsworth was a once-revolutionary poet who later became a conservative and was denounced by Browning and others as a turncoat. This seemed to Bellow to be probably right. More interesting was the related question: What if he'd kept that job?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Who knew what Asiatic form that man's despair was taking ?”
― Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler's Planet

“I was lucky. I got away with it.” He meant that his bad start, his mistakes, the things that might have wrecked him, had somehow combined to establish him. He had almost fallen in with that part of humanity of which he was frequently mindful . . . the part that did not get away with it—the lost, the outcast, the overcome, the effaced, the ruined.”
― Saul Bellow, The Victim

“As for the actual tears and madness, it came about like this.”
― Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King