Saul Bellow Quotes

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

I think truth is weirder than fiction.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

People say I make up wild stories. But all I have to do is write down stuff that really happens.

There's so many different types of illusions; our lives are an illusion in a sense.

The make-believe world of 'The Black Tower' succeeds by broadcasting larger truths that might otherwise elude us.

To accept some idea of truth without experiencing it is like a painting of a cake on paper which you cannot eat.

Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.

The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream.

I sometimes find reality far more fantastical and unlikely than what I could just make up.

Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.

As a son of a man who pretended to be one thing for 33 years of my life and then was another thing, the questions of 'what is real' and 'what is not real' are very blurrily vivid to me.

A reflection of an exact image is the closest thing to you-so that you can see it-but it's far enough away so that you really understand it. There is real life in this movie, but it hovers just an inch above reality.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

I think that if writers don't speak about real life, it's because they don't know it.

Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.

Life's all about perceptions.

Movies are different from real life.

Image is what people perceive my life to be. It's nothing like the truth.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

I think art is more glorious than life but not more real.