Bernard Malamud Quotes

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

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.

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

First drafts are for learning what your story is about.

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.

Life is a tragedy full of joy.

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

The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.

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

The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.

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

You see in others who you are.

A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.

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

A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.

All men are Jews, though few men know it.

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.

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

The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

We're persecuted in the most civilized languages.

A man had to learn, it was his nature.

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

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

In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.

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

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?

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