black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.

Bernard Malamud

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
What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Suffering Taught Uselessness
How can we be strangers if we both believe in God?
BERNARD MALAMUD

Believe Both God Stranger
I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Afterthought Flower Language
Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Happiness Plus Space
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
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
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

Down Forever Hurt Obstacles Overnight
Politics isn’t in my nature.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Nature Politics Work
You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Men Pity Surprise
Writers who can’t invent stories often substitute style for narrative. They remind me of the painter who couldn’t paint people, so he painted chairs.
BERNARD MALAMUD

People Stories Style
The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
BERNARD MALAMUD

Pages Self Stories
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
The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Freedom Others Purpose
There are no wrong books. What’s wrong is the fear of them.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Book Fixers Wrong
You can’t eat language but it eases thirst.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Ease Language Thirst

We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Bernard Malamud Quotes