Mr. Sammler's Planet

"It's true that I didn't like your review of Sammler. I didn't dislike it more than other pieces of yours, but I disliked it. It appeared more than a year after publication of the book and I had heard that an earlier and more friendly review had been rejected by the editors, but knowing what gossip is, I did not take this to be fact. It was the conclusion of your piece—"God lives!"—that offended me. You meant evidently that I was a megalomaniac. But this didn't seem to me to be literary criticism."

~~ Saul Bellow to Alfred Kazin, March 20, 1974

the power of the truth

"The word 'hero,' long in disrepute, has been redeemed by [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn. He has had the courage, the power of mind and the strength of spirit to speak the truth to the entire world. He is a man of perfect intellectual honor and, in his moral strength, he is peculiarly Russian. To the best Russian writers of this hellish century it has been perfectly clear that only the power of the truth is equal to the power of the state."

~~ Saul Bellow to The New York Times, January 7, 1974