Bernard Malamud Quotes

• Life is a tragedy full of joy.

  Bernard Malamud

  Topics in Joy, Life

• 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.

  Bernard Malamud

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Bernard Malamud

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Bernard Malamud

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.

  Bernard Malamud

  Topics in Uncategorized

• ‘Mourning is a hard business,’ Cesare said. ‘If people knew there’d be less death.’

  Bernard Malamud

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Bernard Malamud

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.

  Bernard Malamud

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writing

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

  Bernard Malamud

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Everything, Looking

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

  Bernard Malamud

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Forget, Remind

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

  Bernard Malamud

  Topics in Love, Work

• 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.

  Bernard Malamud

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Time

• The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.

  Bernard Malamud

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Moving, Idea

• Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

  Bernard Malamud

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writing, Exquisite

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

  Bernard Malamud

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Write

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

  Bernard Malamud

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Live

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

  Bernard Malamud

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Far, Heroes

Bernard Malamud (18)

Birth:	26th April, 1904
Death:	18th March, 1986
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Author, Teacher

About

Bernard Malamud was an American author of novels and short stories. Along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer, about antisemitism in Tsarist Russia, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

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