You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.
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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Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.
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A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
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A man had to learn, it was his nature.
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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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In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.
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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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For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.
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As long as a man stays alive he can’t tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.
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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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Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.
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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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First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it….
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If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you.
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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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Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
BERNARD MALAMUD








