You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.
BERNARD MALAMUDIt’s one thing for a man not to know, not to have learned; it’s another not to be able to live by what one does know.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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As long as a man stays alive he can’t tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.
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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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One’s fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
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We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.
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You can’t eat language but it eases thirst.
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Without heroes, we are all plain people and don’t know how far we can go.
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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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We can’t all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.
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I fix what’s broken – except in the heart.
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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 sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
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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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Nationality isn’t soul.
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The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud.
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All my life I wanted to accomplish something worthwhile-a thing people will say took a little something.
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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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Life is a tragedy full of joy.
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How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.
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All men are Jews, though few men know it.
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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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A man had to learn, it was his nature.
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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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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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If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you.
BERNARD MALAMUD