Saul Bellow - Write at Night

All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.

Life’s like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.

About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.

Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

You have only one life to live and it mustn’t be wronged.

It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.

Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.

An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.

I am still determined to be cheerful and happy, in whatever situation I may be; for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances.

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success – but only if you persist.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.

The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.

Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.

What’s important is promising something to the people, not actually keeping those promises. The people have always lived on hope alone.

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

Don’t turn away from possible futures before you’re certain you don’t have anything to learn from them.

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

I write with experiences in mind, but I don’t write about them, I write out of them.

There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

Neither can embellishments of language be found without arrangement and expression of thoughts, nor can thoughts be made to shine without the light of language.

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday.

To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires.