We didn’t starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.
BERNARD MALAMUDI 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.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.
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We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.
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I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
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There are no wrong books. What’s wrong is the fear of them.
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Nationality isn’t soul.
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All men are Jews, though few men know it.
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The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud.
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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.
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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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The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
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Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.
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The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
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You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.
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Charity you can give even when you haven’t got.
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A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
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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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How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.
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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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No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.
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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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I don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
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I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
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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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One’s fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
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The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
BERNARD MALAMUD