Saul Bellow Quotes About Writing
-
Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come 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.
→ -
Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.
→ -
I've 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.'
→ -
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.
→ -
A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.
→ -
I don't like to write from a flat, cold position. You must like what you're doing very much or like the people -- either like them or hate them. You can't be indifferent.
→ -
A writer is in the broadest sense a spokesman of his community. Through him that community comes to know its heart. Without such knowledge, how long can it survive?
→ -
All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
→ -
A writer is a reader moved to emulation.
→ -
You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
→ -
I am deeply moved when I write. I get turned on by it. I've never used any drugs for stimulation. I don't use words loosely. When I'm working and the right word comes, there is an answering resonance within me. There is also a hardness of intention that goes with it. There is no idleness in it.
→ -
The writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he [or she] can at times come between the madly distracted and the distractions.
→ -
I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.
→
Related Authors
-
Philip Roth Novelist -
Don DeLillo Writer -
John Dos Passos Novelist -
James Joyce Novelist -
Delmore Schwartz Poet -
Evelyn Waugh Writer -
William Faulkner Writer -
Eugenio Montale Poet -
Adam Bellow Author -
John Updike Novelist -
Joseph Conrad Author -
Vladimir Nabokov Novelist -
Allan Bloom Philosopher -
Martin Amis Novelist -
John Cheever Novelist -
Bernard Malamud Author -
Isaac Bashevis Singer Author -
Norman Mailer Novelist -
Thomas Pynchon Novelist -
Ralph Ellison Novelist