Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Bernard Malamud
Age: 71 †
Born: 1914
Born: April 26
Died: 1986
Died: March 18
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Pure
Biography
Fiction
Mud
Past
Legend
Make
Biographies
Time
Clay
Life
Legends
Wholly
Exudes
Ultimately
Recaptured

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

Image
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.
Bernard Malamud
Image
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
Image
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.
Bernard Malamud
Image
The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
Bernard Malamud
Image
Without heroes, we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
Bernard Malamud
Image
The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
Bernard Malamud
Image
The great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.
Bernard Malamud
Image
What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
Bernard Malamud
Image
Where to look if you've lost your mind?
Bernard Malamud
Image
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
Image
I don't think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
Bernard Malamud
Image
It was all those biographies in me yelling, 'We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you.'
Bernard Malamud
Image
Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
Bernard Malamud
Image
We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is most of us have to be strangers.
Bernard Malamud
Image
We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.
Bernard Malamud
Image
The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
Bernard Malamud
Image
First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
Bernard Malamud
Image
I fix what's broken - except in the heart.
Bernard Malamud
Image
A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
Bernard Malamud
Image
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