Quote

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.

Bernard Malamud

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Bernard Malamud
Age: 71 †
Born: 1914
Born: April 26
Died: 1986
Died: March 18
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Sense
Separate
Body
Bodies
Best
Loneliness
Live
Lonely
Matter
Matters
Insects
Way
Mystery
Island
Men
Stars
Cosmos
Easy
Islands

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

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Politics isn't in my nature.
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The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
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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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What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
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The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
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I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
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Where to look if you've lost your mind?
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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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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.
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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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A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
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First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
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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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The great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.
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Charity you can give even when you haven't got.
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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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The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
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The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
Bernard Malamud