Bernard malamud quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

You see in others who you are.

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.

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

In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.

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

The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.

All men are Jews, though few men know it.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.

The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.

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.

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.

Life is a tragedy full of joy.

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

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.

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?

Where to look if you've lost your mind?

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.

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

Nationality isn't soul.

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

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.

A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.

A man had to learn, it was his nature.

A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.

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.

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.

We're persecuted in the most civilized languages.

First drafts are for learning what your story is about.

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

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

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

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

Politics isn't in my nature.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

You can't eat language but it eases thirst.

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.

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

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

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.

I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.

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

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

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.

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.

... 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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