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 MALAMUDThe short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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 in my country (Russia) a quotation: “It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.
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What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
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(Clothes) cannot change a man’s nature. He’s either kind or he isn’t, with or without clothes.
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You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.
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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.
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Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.
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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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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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We didn’t starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.
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How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.
BERNARD MALAMUD