A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow
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Saul Bellow quotes
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.
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
Any artist should be grateful for a nanve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.
California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that.
Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.
Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.
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."
I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side.
If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.
No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.
People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
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.
She was what we used to call a suicide blond - dyed by her own hand.
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.
What is art but a way of seeing?
When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.
You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
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