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.
BERNARD MALAMUDThe 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.
More Bernard Malamud Quotes
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The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
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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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….
BERNARD MALAMUD -
I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
It’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.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
Where to look if you’ve lost your mind?
BERNARD MALAMUD -
A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
When I don’t feel hurt, I hope they bury me.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
A man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all loneliness and men know it best.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.
BERNARD MALAMUD -
The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.
BERNARD MALAMUD