Bernard Malamud famous quotes

Without heroes, we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Inspirational #Inspiring #Veterans Day

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

#Tattoo #Wall #Men

The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
-- Bernard Malamud

#Steps #Normal

Life is a tragedy full of joy.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Life #Joy #Tragedy

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Writing #Revision #Pleasure

The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Baseball #Quality #Mythology

The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Moving #Writing #Ideas

Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Writing #Who You Are

A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Men #Constructs

Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Writing #Ideas #Reform

First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Stories #Firsts

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Writing #Teach #Uncertainty

The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Past #Experience #Clay

Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Life #Loss #Joy

... we are all terribly alone no matter what people say.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Loneliness #People #Matter

I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Knowledge #Littles #Sometimes

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

#Book #Would Be #Matter

You see in others who you are.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Identity #Who You Are

We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: "It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Country #Apology #Russia

(Clothes) cannot change a man's nature. He's either kind or he isn't, with or without clothes.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Men #Clothes #Kind

Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Change #Ears #World

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

#Children #Games #Stranger

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

#Dark #Self #Unity

We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.
-- Bernard Malamud

#World #Stranger #Human Relations

A man had to learn, it was his nature.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Learning #Men

I don't think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Giving Up #Thinking #Giving

I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Two #Sometimes #Metaphor

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

#Men #Thinking #Doubt

Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Wine #Sadness #Tragedy

You can't eat language but it eases thirst.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Ease #Language #Thirst

I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Flower #Language

Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Writing

The great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Writing #Important #About Yourself

... 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

#Believe #Clouds #Sky

How can we be strangers if we both believe in God?
-- Bernard Malamud

#Believe #Stranger #Believe In God

If you don't hear His voice so let Him hear yours. When prayers go up blessings descend.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Prayer #Blessing #Voice

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

#Perseverance #Men #Long

Politics isn't in my nature.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Politics

Nationality isn't soul ...
-- Bernard Malamud

#Soul

For misery don't blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Giving #Misery #Blame

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it.... The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Book #Ideas #Needs

No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Anger #Hot #Coal

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

#Stars #Adventure #Moon

I fix what's broken - except in the heart.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Heart #Broken

One's fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Funny Marriage #Return #Fantasy

We didn't starve, but we didn't eat chicken unless we were sick, or the chicken was
-- Bernard Malamud

#Sick #Poverty #Chickens

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

#Men #Justice #Doe

Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Happiness #Space #Plus

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

#Time #Past #Clay

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

#Real #Track #Way

Where to look if you've lost your mind?
-- Bernard Malamud

#Mind #Looks #Lost

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

#Lonely #Stars #Loneliness

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

#Cutting #Circles #Experts

You could not pity anything if you weren't a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Men #Surprise #Pity

What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Suffering #Taught #Uselessness

A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Eye #Spectators #Critical

There are no wrong books. What's wrong is the fear of them.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Book

We're persecuted in the most civilized languages.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Language #Civilized

All my life I wanted to accomplish something worthwhile-a thing people will say took a little something ...
-- Bernard Malamud

#People #Accomplishment #Littles

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

#Writing #Sitting Down #Down And

In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Dream

If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Forget You #Forget #Jew

Charity you can give even when you haven't got.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Giving #Charity

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

#Hurt #Forever #Obstacles

The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Purpose

Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Life #Book #Spoons

If your train's on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Track #Train

All men are Jews, though few men know it.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Men #Jew

It was all those biographies in me yelling, 'We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you.'
-- Bernard Malamud

#Yelling #Done #Want

When I don't feel hurt, I hope they bury me.
-- Bernard Malamud

#Hurt #Feels

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

#Live Life #Two #Suffering