(Clothes) cannot change a man’s nature. He’s either kind or he isn’t, with or without clothes.
BERNARD MALAMUDIt’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.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.
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I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
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The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
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Nationality isn’t soul.
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We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.
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First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
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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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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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Without heroes, we are all plain people and don’t know how far we can go.
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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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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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There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go – if there are no doors or windows he walks through a wall.
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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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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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Charity you can give even when you haven’t got.
BERNARD MALAMUD