Bernard Malamud Quotes - Page 2

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

... 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.

The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.

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?

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.

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

I sometimes confuse myself with the little I 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.

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

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

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

Nationality isn't soul.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Where to look if you've lost your mind?

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