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"After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I decided that I would make boredom my subject matter. That I'd study it. That I'd become the world's leading authority on it. March, that was a red-letter day for humanity. What a field! What a domain! Titanic! Promethean! I trembled before it. I was inspired. I couldn't sleep. Ideas came in the night and I wrote them down, volumes of them. Strange that no one had gone after this systematically.Oh, melancholy, yes, but not modern boredom."
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"Imagination is the creative force that through necessity yields solutions to resolve the issues that face us."

"No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist."

"But the detail of the poem shows power akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history -- that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires."

"The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal that you can gather votes like box tops is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process."

"And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right."

"We are all artists, painting the world with our thoughts while coloring the universe with our deeds."

"If you ever desire to give birth to anything at all, then you cannot do without solitude."

"Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it."

"Like most arts, the link between the mind and the pen can chain you like an enslaved workaholic. Even on an intended vacation you suddenly have this killer urge to record whatever the vacation may teach."
Explore more quotes by Saul Bellow


"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."
Life,


"It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn't have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal parts. Then it was in the line of human advance that Einhorn could do so much."
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