Novelist Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, Canada (1915). He's been publishing fiction for over fifty years; he's written over 30 books, and he's published at least one novel each decade since the 1940s. His novels include The Adventures of Augie March (1954), Humboldt's Gift (1975) and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970).
His first two novels, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947), sold fewer than 5,000 copies combined. He spent most of 1948 in France with his wife, hoping to gather material for a novel. But he grew depressed after a few months: His novel was going nowhere, he wasn't getting along with the French, and the weather was dreary. He decided to start writing a new novel, about a young man's adventures in Chicago just before the Great Depression. That novel became The Adventures of Augie March, and it was his first big success. The British writer Martin Amis recently called it "the Great American Novel" for its "fantastic inclusiveness, its pluralism, its qualmless promiscuity .... Everything is in here."
Last year, The Library of America published Bellow's first three novels in a volume called Novels, 1944-53, making him the first living author to be published by Library of America.
Bellow said, "There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book."
*What is art but a way of seeing?
*A man is only as good as what he loves.
*When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
*I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, "To hell with you.
*Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.
*Happiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.
*A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
*reality comes from giving an account of yourself. (Augie March)
*Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
*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.
*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.
*Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.”
*Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize.
*I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture
*A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.
*A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
*A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out.
*I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we are all put together. We are so proud of our autonomy that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others. One of the booby traps of freedom—which is bordered on all sides by isolation—is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life’s banquet.
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"I've become aware of a conflict between the modern university education I received and those things that I really felt in my soul most deeply. I've trusted those more and more....I know how a modern man is supposed to think....I know that people live by something far deeper than head culture; they couldn't live if they didn't. They couldn't survive if they didn't. What a woman does for her children, what a man does for his family, what people most tenaciously cling to, these thing are not adequately explained by Oedipus complexes, libidos, class struggle, or existential individualism--whatever you like. Now, I know that psychanalysis has found a natural preserve for poets and artist called the unconscious. A writer is supposed to go there and dig around like a truffle hound. He comes back with a truffle, a delicacy for the cultural world....Well, I don't believe that. I don't believe that we go and dig in the unconscious and come back with new truffles from the libidinous unknown. That's not the way it really is" (58-59).
"I think that the university contains all that there is left in this country, or indeed in most countries, of a literary culture" (60).
"I do believe that I have something of importance to transmit....I think of myself as speaking to an inviolate part of other people, around which there is a sort of nearly sacred perimeter, a significant space...a place where the human being really has removed to, with all his most important spiritual possessions" (63).
"Herzog....I think of him as a man who, in the agony of suffering, finds himself to be his own most penetrating critic. And he reexamines his life...by reenacting all the roles he took seriously. And when he has gone through all the reenactments, he's back at the original point....the professor, the son, the brother, the lover, the father, the husband, the avenger, the intellectual--all of it. It's an attempt really to divest himself of the personae....and when he has dismissed these personae, there comes a pause..[grace]..it's better than his trying to invent everything for himself, or accepting human inventions, the collective errors, by which he's lived. He's decided to go through a process of jettisoning or lightening" (64).
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