Literary Birthday – 10 June – Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow was born 10 June 1915, and died 5 April 2005.

12 Saul Bellow Quotes

  1. A writer is a reader moved to emulation.
  2. A writer should be able to express himself easily, naturally, copiously in a form that frees his mind, his energies. Why should he hobble himself with formalities?
  3. Human character is smaller now, people don’t have durable passions; they’ve replaced passions with excitement.
  4. A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
  5. I’ve discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgement and to say in his heart of hearts, ‘To hell with you.’
  6. Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity.
  7. When I finish something, I generally put it on the shelf, and I very seldom look at it unless somebody mentions it to me, and then I open the book, and I read it, and I say, ‘Did I do that?’
  8. You become a writer because you are convinced that you have a grip on reality of a certain distinctive kind. It belongs to you and to others who share such a recognition.
  9. 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 anaesthetic with confidence.
  10. A good novel is worth more than the best scientific study.
  11. People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
  12. Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born American writer. Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times for Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, and The Adventures of Augie March.

Source for image: Photograph by Jeff Lowenthal. Published by Viking Press. – Scan via Common Crow Books. Cropped and retouched; see upload history for unretouched original scan., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90392399

by Amanda Patterson

Please click here for our Literary Birthday Calendar

Posted on: 10th June 2013
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0 thoughts on “Literary Birthday – 10 June – Saul Bellow”

  1. Elaine Dodge

    There’s a spelling mistake in item no. 10. It should be than not then. Just thought you’d like to know in case you want to fix it.

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