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 MALAMUDIt was all those biographies in me yelling, ‘We want out. We want to tell you what we’ve done to you.’
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
-
-
All men are Jews, though few men know it.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
BERNARD MALAMUD -
The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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 -
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 -
Politics isn’t in my nature.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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 -
I fix what’s broken – except in the heart.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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 -
I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
Where to look if you’ve lost your mind?
BERNARD MALAMUD -
A man had to learn, it was his nature.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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 -
You see in others who you are.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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 -
Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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 -
(Clothes) cannot change a man’s nature. He’s either kind or he isn’t, with or without clothes.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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 -
Charity you can give even when you haven’t got.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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….
BERNARD MALAMUD -
You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
How can we be strangers if we both believe in God?
BERNARD MALAMUD