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
Men
Stars
Cosmos
Easy
Islands
Sense
Separate
Body
Bodies
Best
Loneliness
Live
Lonely
Matter
Matters
Insects
Way
Mystery
Island

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

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One's fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
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Without heroes, we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
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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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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.
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First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
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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.
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The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
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Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
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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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The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud.
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We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is most of us have to be strangers.
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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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I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
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A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
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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.
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What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
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We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.
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It was all those biographies in me yelling, 'We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you.'
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If your train's on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
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As long as a man stays alive he can't tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.
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