Top 93 Bernard Malamud Quotes
#1. Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.
Bernard Malamud
#2. But she had recently come to think that in such unhappy times
when the odds were so high against personal happiness
to find love was miraculous, and to fulfill it as best two people could was what really mattered.
Bernard Malamud
#3. If your train's on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
Bernard Malamud
#4. Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.
Bernard Malamud
#5. She is not for you. She is a wild one
wild, without shame. This is not a bride for a rabbi.
Bernard Malamud
#7. Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.
Bernard Malamud
#9. The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.
Bernard Malamud
#10. They say God appeared in history and used it for his purposes, but if that was so he had no pity for men.
Bernard Malamud
#11. Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.
Bernard Malamud
#12. The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
Bernard Malamud
#13. If you ever forget you're a Jew, a Gentile will remind you.
Bernard Malamud
#14. I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
Bernard Malamud
#16. There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go
if there are no doors or windows
he walks through a wall.
Bernard Malamud
#18. The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.
(Interview, New York Post Magazine, September 14, 1958)
Bernard Malamud
#19. It's one thing for a man not to know, not to have learned; it's another not to be able to live by what one does know.
Bernard Malamud
#21. I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
Bernard Malamud
#22. Since I can't be a professional on account of lack of education I wouldn't mind being wealthy.
Bernard Malamud
#23. Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.
Bernard Malamud
#24. I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.
Bernard Malamud
#25. Without heroes we are all plain people and don't know how far it is we can go.
Bernard Malamud
#28. You could not pity anything if you weren't a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.
Bernard Malamud
#29. A meshummed gives up one God for another. I don't want either. We live in a world where the clock ticks fast while he's on his timeless mountain staring in space. He doesn't see us and he doesn't care. Today I want my piece of bread, not in Paradise.
Bernard Malamud
#31. As long as a man stays alive he can't tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.
Bernard Malamud
#32. First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge & enhance an idea, to reform it ... Revision is one of the true pleasures of writing.
Bernard Malamud
#33. will you please explain how you can cry for a dead dog yet belong to a society of fanatics that urges death on human beings who happen to be Jews? Explain to me the logic of it.
Bernard Malamud
#34. Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
Bernard Malamud
#35. What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
Bernard Malamud
#36. (Clothes) cannot change a man's nature. He's either kind or he isn't, with or without clothes.
Bernard Malamud
#37. A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
Bernard Malamud
#38. Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered
sometimes it seemed to take forever
went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.
Bernard Malamud
#39. He remembered how satisfied he had been as a youngster, and that with the little he had had - a dog, a stick, an aloneness he loved (which did not bleed him like his later loneliness), and he wished he could have lived longer in his boyhood. This was an old thought with him.
Bernard Malamud
#40. No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.
Bernard Malamud
#41. For misery don't blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.
Bernard Malamud
#42. We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.
Bernard Malamud
#43. The great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.
Bernard Malamud
#44. A man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all loneliness and men know it best.
Bernard Malamud
#47. Writers who can't invent stories often substitute style for narrative. They remind me of the painter who couldn't paint people, so he painted chairs.
Bernard Malamud
#49. If the stories come, you get them written, you're on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.
Bernard Malamud
#50. It was a strange thing about people- they could look the same but be different.
Bernard Malamud
#51. We have two lives ... the life we learn with and the life we live after that. Suffering is what brings us towards happiness.
Bernard Malamud
#55. The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
Bernard Malamud
#56. Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.
Bernard Malamud
#57. It was all those biographies in me yelling, 'We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you.'
Bernard Malamud
#58. Without heroes we're all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
Bernard Malamud
#60. Ithink Isaid'All menare Jews excepttheydon't know it.'I doubt I expected anyone to take the statement literally. But I think it's an understandable statement and a metaphoric way of indicating how history, sooner or later, treats all men.
Bernard Malamud
#63. You write by sitting down and writing. There's no particular time or place - you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he's disciplined, doesn't matter.
Bernard Malamud
#64. Life, despite their frantic yoohooings, had passed them by.
Bernard Malamud
#65. We have two lives the one we learn with and the life we live after that.
Bernard Malamud
#67. Some men are by nature explorers; my nature is to stay under the same moon and stars, and if the weather is wet, under the same roof. It's a strange world, why make it stranger?
Bernard Malamud
#68. She waited uneasily and shyly. From afar he saw that her eyes
clearly her father's
were filled with desperate innocence. He pictured, in her, his own redemption. Violins and lit candles revolved in the sky. Leo ran forward with flowers out-thrust.
Bernard Malamud
#69. We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.
Bernard Malamud
#70. One's fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
Bernard Malamud
#72. If you don't hear His voice so let Him hear yours. When prayers go up blessings descend.
Bernard Malamud
#73. All my life I wanted to accomplish something worthwhile-a thing people will say took a little something ...
Bernard Malamud
#74. I don't think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
Bernard Malamud
#76. We didn't starve, but we didn't eat chicken unless we were sick, or the chicken was
Bernard Malamud
#78. Would you say you have a "philosophy" Of your own? If so what is it?'
'If I have it's all skin and bones ... If I have any philosophy ... it's that life could be better than it is.
Bernard Malamud
#79. There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of self with what the self perceives, and exquisite mystical experience.
Bernard Malamud
#80. INTERVIEWER:
What specific piece of advice would you give to young writers?
MALAMUD:
Write your heart out.
Bernard Malamud
#81. His worst fault is he thinks his brains entitle him to certain privileges.
Bernard Malamud
#84. It's possible to let love fly by like a cloud in a windy sky if one is too timid, or perhaps unable to believe he is entitled to good fortune.
Bernard Malamud
#85. If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you.
Bernard Malamud
#86. Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
Bernard Malamud
#87. The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
Bernard Malamud
#88. There are no wrong books. What's wrong is the fear of them.
Bernard Malamud
#91. Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.
Bernard Malamud
#93. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
Bernard Malamud
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