It was all those biographies in me yelling, ‘We want out. We want to tell you what we’ve done to you.’
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
-
-
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 -
Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
Life is a tragedy full of joy.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.
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.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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 -
… 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.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
We can’t all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.
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 -
What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
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 -
Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.
BERNARD MALAMUD