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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.
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
Past
Legend
Make
Biographies
Time
Clay
Life
Legends
Wholly
Exudes
Ultimately
Recaptured
Pure
Biography
Fiction
Mud
More quotes by Bernard Malamud
As long as a man stays alive he can't tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.
Bernard Malamud
Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
Bernard Malamud
To any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new. Even Matisse painted some of his Fauvist pictures in anxiety. Maybe that helped him to simplify. Character, discipline, negative capability count. Write, complete, revise. If it doesn't work, begin something else.
Bernard Malamud
The great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.
Bernard Malamud
It was all those biographies in me yelling, 'We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you.'
Bernard Malamud
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.
Bernard Malamud
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.
Bernard Malamud
Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.
Bernard Malamud
I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
Bernard Malamud
The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud.
Bernard Malamud
I don't think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
Bernard Malamud
There are no wrong books. What's wrong is the fear of them.
Bernard Malamud
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
We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is most of us have to be strangers.
Bernard Malamud
Without heroes, we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
Bernard Malamud
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
What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
Bernard Malamud
Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
Bernard Malamud
First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
Bernard Malamud
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.
Bernard Malamud
