No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.
BERNARD MALAMUDNo use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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You can’t eat language but it eases thirst.
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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
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The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
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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.
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.
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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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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.
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I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
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A man had to learn, it was his nature.
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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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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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Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.
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If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
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Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
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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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When I don’t feel hurt, I hope they bury me.
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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.
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Charity you can give even when you haven’t got.
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Life is a tragedy full of joy.
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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 wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
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We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: “It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.
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In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.
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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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How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.
BERNARD MALAMUD