What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
BERNARD MALAMUDA writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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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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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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To any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
(Clothes) cannot change a man’s nature. He’s either kind or he isn’t, with or without clothes.
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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.
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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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Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.
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I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
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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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Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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It’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.
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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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The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.
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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.
BERNARD MALAMUD