Best 62 quotes of Bernard Malamud on MyQuotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

... 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.

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

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

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.

Life is a tragedy full of joy.

Nationality isn't soul.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

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?

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.

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

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.

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

The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.

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.

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

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

We didn't starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.

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

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

We're persecuted in the most civilized languages.

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