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Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered-sometimes it seemed to take forever-went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.

Bernard Malamud

If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Stations Track Train
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
There are no wrong books. What’s wrong is the fear of them.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Book Fixers Wrong
Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Sadness Tragedy Wine
I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Afterthought Flower Language
Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Book Inspire Life Resurrecting
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

Clay Past Recapture Time
When I don’t feel hurt, I hope they bury me.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Bury Feels Hope Hurt
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

Ideas Reform Revision Work Writing
Ithink Isaid’All menare Jews excepttheydon’t know it.’I doubt I expected anyone to take the statement literally. But I think it’s an understandable statement and a metaphoric way of indicating how history, sooner or later, treats all men.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Doubt Men Metaphoric Statement Thinking
Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Illusion Joy Life Loss
A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Reading Surprise Worth
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

Apparteally Attempt Confusion Experience Time Uncontrolled
All men are Jews, though few men know it.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Jew Knows Men
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
Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Pleasure Revision Writing

Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered-sometimes it seemed to take forever-went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.

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Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered-sometimes it seemed to take forever-went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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