Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.
BERNARD MALAMUD(Clothes) cannot change a man’s nature. He’s either kind or he isn’t, with or without clothes.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.
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In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.
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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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If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
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One’s fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
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There are no wrong books. What’s wrong is the fear of them.
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You can’t eat language but it eases thirst.
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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
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How can we be strangers if we both believe in God?
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Life is a tragedy full of joy.
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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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Charity you can give even when you haven’t got.
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We can’t all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.
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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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I don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
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When I don’t feel hurt, I hope they bury me.
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All men are Jews, though few men know it.
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I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
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Politics isn’t in my nature.
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To any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new.
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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.
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.
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Where to look if you’ve lost your mind?
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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.
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For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.
BERNARD MALAMUD