I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
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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The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
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For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.
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A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
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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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Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.
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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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To any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new.
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And if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small things to offer – he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity.
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How can we be strangers if we both believe in God?
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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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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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I fix what’s broken – except in the heart.
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We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.
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You can’t eat language but it eases thirst.
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Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.
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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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The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
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Without heroes, we are all plain people and don’t know how far we can go.
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No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.
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What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
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First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
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How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.
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Nationality isn’t soul.
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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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The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
BERNARD MALAMUD