Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.
Saul BellowRead
Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.
Interpretation
Artists should appreciate the simplicity and instinctive creativity that allows them to create without overthinking.
Saul Bellow's quote emphasizes the importance of an innate, unrefined talent that allows artists to express themselves freely and authentically. This 'naive grace' frees them from the analytical constraints that can hinder the creative process, suggesting that sometimes pure instinct can lead to the most profound artistic expressions.
In practice
In an art class, a teacher might use this quote to inspire students to trust their instincts.
Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.
When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
In here, the human bosom -- mine, yours, everybody's -- there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul. Now! Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?' Are you with me?
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.'
I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
My poems are naughty, but my life is pure.
The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
It was pitch dark. I could hear only the violin, and it was as though Juliek's soul were the bow. He was playing his life. The whole of his life was gliding on the strings--his last hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future. He played as he would never play again...When I awoke, in the daylight, I could see Juliek, opposite me, slumped over, dead. Near him lay his violin, smashed, trampled, a strange overwhelming little corpse.
I'm not such a fan of imagination. If you're alive to details, they oftentimes suggest a richer or deeper imaginative line than you would have imagined.
Camera lies all the time. It’s all it does is lie, because when you choose this moment instead of this moment, when you… the moment you’ve made a choice, you’re lying about something larger. Lying is an ugly word. I don’t mean lying. But any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.
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