We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.
BERNARD MALAMUDSomewhere 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.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
-
-
What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
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 -
Where to look if you’ve lost your mind?
BERNARD MALAMUD -
We can’t all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
Life is a tragedy full of joy.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
All men are Jews, though few men know it.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
One’s fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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 -
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