Bernard Malamud Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

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

Bernard Malamud
There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to – if there are no doors or windows – he walks through a wall.

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

Bernard Malamud
I think I said "All men are Jews except they don'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.

Bernard Malamud
There's no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew.

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

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

Bernard Malamud
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.

Bernard Malamud
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?

Bernard Malamud
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.

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

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

Bernard Malamud
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.

Bernard Malamud
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.

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

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

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

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

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

Bernard Malamud
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.

Bernard Malamud
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.

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

Bernard Malamud
"Mourning is a hard business," Cesare said. "If people knew there'd be less death."

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

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

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

Bernard Malamud
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.

Bernard Malamud
Levin wanted friendship and got friendliness; he wanted steak and they offered spam.

Bernard Malamud
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.

Bernard Malamud
There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was. Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction. What does that tell you about the nature of life, and does one really want to know?

Bernard Malamud