Bernard Malamud Quotations

A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.

The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.

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.

We have two lives the one we learn with and the life we live after that.

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

Without heroes, we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.

I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.

Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.

If you ever forget you're a Jew, a Gentile will remind you.

We have two lives... the life we learn with and the life we live after that. Suffering is what brings us towards happiness.

If your train's on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.

Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.

Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered-sometimes it seemed to take forever-went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.

Charity you can give even when you haven't got.

If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you.

In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.

You write by sitting down and writing. There's no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he's disciplined, doesn't matter.

All my life I wanted to accomplish something worthwhile-a thing people will say took a little something ...

Some men are by nature explorers; my nature is to stay under the same moon and stars, and if the weather is wet, under the same roof. It's a strange world, why make it stranger?

No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.

Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.

We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: "It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.

(Clothes) cannot change a man's nature. He's either kind or he isn't, with or without clothes.

It was all those biographies in me yelling, 'We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you.'

When I don't feel hurt, I hope they bury me.

What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.

You could not pity anything if you weren't a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.

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.

Where to look if you've lost your mind?

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.

Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.

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.

We didn't starve, but we didn't eat chicken unless we were sick, or the chicken was

One's fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.

I fix what's broken - except in the heart.

There are no wrong books. What's wrong is the fear of them.

We're persecuted in the most civilized languages.

Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.

Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.

To any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new. Even Matisse painted some of his Fauvist pictures in anxiety. Maybe that helped him to simplify. Character, discipline, negative capability count. Write, complete, revise. If it doesn't work, begin something else.

How can we be strangers if we both believe in God?

... it's possible to let love fly by like a cloud in a windy sky if one is too timid, or perhaps unable to believe he is entitled to good fortune.

The great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.

Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.

You can't eat language but it eases thirst.

Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.

I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.

I don't think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.

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.

I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.

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. 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, 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.

A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.

The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime

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.

If you don't hear His voice so let Him hear yours. When prayers go up blessings descend.

Politics isn't in my nature.

For misery don't blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.

Nationality isn't soul ...

We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.

As long as a man stays alive he can't tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.

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.

A man had to learn, it was his nature.

Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.

I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.

The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud.

... we are all terribly alone no matter what people say.

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.... The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.

The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.

You see in others who you are.

Life is a tragedy full of joy.

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.

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.

First drafts are for learning what your story is about.

The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course

All men are Jews, though few men know it.

The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.

I for one believe that not enough has been made of the tragedy of the destruction of 6 million Jews. Somebody has to cry-even if it's a writer, 20 years later.