A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
BERNARD MALAMUDThere 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.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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Without heroes, we are all plain people and don’t know how far we can go.
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… it’s possible to let love fly by like a cloud in a windy sky if one is too timid, or perhaps unable to believe he is entitled to good fortune.
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Where to look if you’ve lost your mind?
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How can we be strangers if we both believe in God?
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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 could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.
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The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
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Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.
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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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To any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new.
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It was all those biographies in me yelling, ‘We want out. We want to tell you what we’ve done to you.’
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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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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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Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.
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I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
BERNARD MALAMUD