Bernard Malamud Quotes
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... 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.
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I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
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We didn't starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.
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We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: "It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.
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For misery don't blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.
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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.
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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.
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Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.
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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.
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We're persecuted in the most civilized languages.
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Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.
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Charity you can give even when you haven't got.
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If you don't hear His voice so let Him hear yours. When prayers go up blessings descend.
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The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
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Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
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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.
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We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.
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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.
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I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
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No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.
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In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.
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I don't think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
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It was all those biographies in me yelling, 'We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you.'
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First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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