Bernard Malamud Quotes

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

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 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.

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

When I don't feel hurt, I hope they bury me.

Where to look if you've lost your mind?

I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.

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

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.

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

The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime

Politics isn't in my nature.

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.

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.

Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.

You can't eat language but it eases thirst.

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.

Nationality isn't soul.

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

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.

Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.", September 14, 1958)

They say God appeared in history and used it for his purposes, but if that was so he had no pity for men.

It was a strange thing about people- they could look the same but be different.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying it

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