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 MALAMUDTo any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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Life is a tragedy full of joy.
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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.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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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What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
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.
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For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.
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The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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 -
Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.
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The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
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How can we be strangers if we both believe in God?
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 -
I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
It was all those biographies in me yelling, ‘We want out. We want to tell you what we’ve done to you.’
BERNARD MALAMUD