If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
BERNARD MALAMUDA writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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Where to look if you’ve lost your mind?
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
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One often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to understand.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
And if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small things to offer – he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
As long as a man stays alive he can’t tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
I don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
Without heroes, we are all plain people and don’t know how far we can go.
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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.’
BERNARD MALAMUD -
A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
One’s fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
Nationality isn’t soul.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go – if there are no doors or windows he walks through a wall.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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.
BERNARD MALAMUD