You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.
BERNARD MALAMUDWe have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.
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Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.
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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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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.
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Nationality isn’t soul.
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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.
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Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.
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The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
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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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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 the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.
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In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.
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It was all those biographies in me yelling, ‘We want out. We want to tell you what we’ve done to you.’
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How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.
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The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud.
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We didn’t starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.
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… it’s possible to let love fly by like a cloud in a windy sky if one is too timid, or perhaps unable to believe he is entitled to good fortune.
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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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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
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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….
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(Clothes) cannot change a man’s nature. He’s either kind or he isn’t, with or without clothes.
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All men are Jews, though few men know it.
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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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The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
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What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
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You can’t eat language but it eases thirst.
BERNARD MALAMUD