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 MALAMUDAs long as a man stays alive he can’t tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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There are no wrong books. What’s wrong is the fear of them.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.
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 -
One often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to understand.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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 -
Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.
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 -
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 -
A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
Life is a tragedy full of joy.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
And if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small things to offer – he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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 -
Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.
BERNARD MALAMUD







