(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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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.
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We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.
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Politics isn’t in my nature.
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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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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First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
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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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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.
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I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
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You see in others who you are.
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I don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
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The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
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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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Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.
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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.
BERNARD MALAMUD