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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.

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

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

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I fix what's broken - except in the heart.
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.
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What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
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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.
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I don't think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
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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The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
Bernard Malamud
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The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
Bernard Malamud
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Charity you can give even when you haven't got.
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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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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The great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.
Bernard Malamud
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One's fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
Bernard Malamud
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If the stories come, you get them written, you're on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.
Bernard Malamud
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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.
Bernard Malamud
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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.
Bernard Malamud
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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
Bernard Malamud
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I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
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