Quote

A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.

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
Surprise
Worth
Writer
Reading

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

Image
The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
Bernard Malamud
Image
I don't think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
Bernard Malamud
Image
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
Image
Where to look if you've lost your mind?
Bernard Malamud
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.
Bernard Malamud
Image
You see in others who you are.
Bernard Malamud
Image
Charity you can give even when you haven't got.
Bernard Malamud
Image
Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
Bernard Malamud
Image
What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
Bernard Malamud
Image
The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
Bernard Malamud
Image
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
Image
Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
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
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
First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
Bernard Malamud
Image
I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
Bernard Malamud
Image
If your train's on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
Bernard Malamud
Image
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