I've been hoarding every page of Saul Bellow's Collected Letters the same way a great chef might with a cupboard full of the finest ingredients available: relishing each pleasurable drop, wringing out every joy, and milking every single dollop of goodness, until this afternoon when I read his final letter and sadly had to close the book.

Bellow reaches places in me no other author has ever come close to. A light bulb turned on in my head almost thirty years ago when I first began to read him and it's never gone off.

Why my enthusiasm has lost none of it's fierceness is something I can't adequately answer; perhaps I should n't try either, after all we can kill the thing we love with over analysis.

Press me, and I'll say something about the strength of the writing; every sentence of Bellow reminds me of one those Inca walls, huge blocks fitted together without a gap between them them, not a word out of place, everything fits; his imagery is delicious, in one of his letters, Bellow tells the recipient that he is like an Anaconda slowly digesting an idea. I love that, the notion of intellectual enzymes slowly breaking down a stodgy concept into something eventually nutritious.

His opening lines always sizzle and sing. The Victim begins "On some nights New York is as hot as Bangkok"; I was in New York on such a night almost thirty years ago reading that book for the first time, when the night time air was steamy, dank, tropical, every street a throbbing sauna.

Bellow's characters are extraordinary in their philosophical and intellectual reach, and at the same time as conflicted and complicated as anyone else. Herzog, the metaphysically wounded scholar cum frenzied letter writer of the eponymous novel is as confused about ordinary life as anyone else, maybe even more so at times, but someone who begets empathy.

I have had so many warm nights of the soul reading Bellow, heartened and encouraged by his words, the ardour of his writing, the passion for life and of life that his characters radiate like mini-furnaces, their dilemmas, which are private to them but nevertheless universal to us all. I should have written him a letter to thank him. I have now.