You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.
BERNARD MALAMUDI love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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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.
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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.
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If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you.
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If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
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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?
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Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
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For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.
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Nationality isn’t soul.
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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.
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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
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Where to look if you’ve lost your mind?
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In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.
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Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
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A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
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A man had to learn, it was his nature.
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I don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
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The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.
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Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.
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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.
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Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.
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The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
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Life is a tragedy full of joy.
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How can we be strangers if we both believe in God?
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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There are no wrong books. What’s wrong is the fear of them.
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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