Quote

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

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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
Dead
Alive
Chance
Stays
Tell
Signs
Next
Chances
Long
Perseverance
Men
Checks
Pops

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

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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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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
Bernard Malamud
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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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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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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.
Bernard Malamud
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What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
Bernard Malamud
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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.
Bernard Malamud
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When I don't feel hurt, I hope they bury me.
Bernard Malamud
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The great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.
Bernard Malamud
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Politics isn't in my nature.
Bernard Malamud
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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.
Bernard Malamud
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
Bernard Malamud
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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.'
Bernard Malamud
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I fix what's broken - except in the heart.
Bernard Malamud
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All men are Jews, though few men know it.
Bernard Malamud
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The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
Bernard Malamud
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Without heroes, we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
Bernard Malamud
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One's fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
Bernard Malamud
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Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
Bernard Malamud