Top 79 Quotes & Sayings by Bernard Malamud

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

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

Life is a tragedy full of joy.

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

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

The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

All men are Jews, though few men know it.

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

A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.

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

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

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

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

First drafts are for learning what your story is about.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.

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?

I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.

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

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

Nationality isn't soul.

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

In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.

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

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

You see in others who you are.

The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.

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

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.

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.

... 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.

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.

Where to look if you've lost your mind?

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.

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

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

A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.

The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.

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