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 MALAMUDAll men are Jews, though few men know it.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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A man had to learn, it was his nature.
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.
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I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
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For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.
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We didn’t starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.
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Life is a tragedy full of joy.
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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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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
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All my life I wanted to accomplish something worthwhile-a thing people will say took a little something.
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The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
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The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.
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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.
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If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you.
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I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist.
BERNARD MALAMUD








