With him, exclusively mental acts seldom occurred.  He was temperamentally an image man.  To observe so much was not practical, sometimes it was disabling, often downright painful, but actualities could not be left out.  -Saul Bellows

 . . . he seemed well enough to himself, with a mouth like a simple declarative sentence, although there were so many complex-compound things to be said.  -Saul Bellows

He was eye-sick, head -sick, seat-sick, motion-sick, gut-sick, wheeel weary.  -Saul Bellows

  “If you venture to think in America, you also feel an obligation to provide a historical sketch to go with it, to authenticate or legitimize your thoughts.  So it’s one moment of flashing insight and then a quarter of an hour of pedantry and tiresome elaboration - academic gabble.  Locke to Freud with stops at local stations like Bentham and Kiekegaard.  One has to feel sorry for people in such a bind.  Or else (a better alternative) one can develop an eye for the comical side of this.” – Saul Bellow

“As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting - the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began.” – Saul Bellow

 “These proliferating thoughts have more affinity to insomnia that to mental progress.  Oscillations of the mental substance is what they are, ever-increasing jitters.” – Saul Bellow

 “That was part of your inside satin.  Or the susceptibility of a mind subject to trances.  The objects you looked at had more colors and dimensions than the others were ever aware of.” – Saul Bellow

 “When you get an outside view of your behavior, it looks horrible.  Is it you that’s horrible, or the viewers?  Your torment is left out.” – Saul Bellow