black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

Life is a tragedy full of joy.

Bernard Malamud

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.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Diversity Justice Know Learn Men
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….
BERNARD MALAMUD

Book Firsts Ideas
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.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Dark Experiences Mystical Self
Life is a tragedy full of joy.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Follow Joy Life Your Heart
Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Boring Live Mode Writing
I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Afterthought Flower Language
I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Metaphor Sometimes Two
If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Few Forget Jokes Remind
We can’t all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Human Relations Stranger World
Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Change Ears World
Some men are by nature explorers; my nature is to stay under the same moon and stars, and if the weather is wet, under the same roof. It’s a strange world, why make it stranger?
BERNARD MALAMUD

Adventure Moon Stars
A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Reading Surprise Worth
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

Book Frivolous Leisure Matter
A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Constructs Freedom Invent Men
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

Insects Loneliness Lonely Matter Men Stars
First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Draft Firsts Learn Stories

Life is a tragedy full of joy.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

Life is a tragedy full of joy.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Bernard Malamud Quotes