Quotes from Bernard Malamud

Would you say you have a "philosophy" Of your own? If so what is it?' 'If I have it's all skin and bones...If I have any philosophy...it's that life could be better than it is.

A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.

We're persecuted in the most civilized languages.

His worst fault is he thinks his brains entitle him to certain privileges.

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge & enhance an idea, to reform it . . . Revision is one of the true pleasures of writing.

Without heroes we are all plain people and don't know how far it is we can go.

Charity you can give even when you haven't got.

I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist. One often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to understand, and if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small things to offer - he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity.

Nobody lived in Eden anymore.

She waited uneasily and shyly. From afar he saw that her eyes--clearly her father's--were filled with desperate innocence. He pictured, in her, his own redemption. Violins and lit candles revolved in the sky. Leo ran forward with flowers out-thrust.

He remembered how satisfied he had been as a youngster, and that with the little he had had - a dog, a stick, an aloneness he loved (which did not bleed him like his later loneliness), and he wished he could have lived longer in his boyhood. This was an old thought with him.

A meshummed gives up one God for another. I don't want either. We live in a world where the clock ticks fast while he's on his timeless mountain staring in space. He doesn't see us and he doesn't care. Today I want my piece of bread, not in Paradise.

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

... 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.

Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.

In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.

But she had recently come to think that in such unhappy times--when the odds were so high against personal happiness--to find love was miraculous, and to fulfill it as best two people could was what really mattered.

She is not for you. She is a wild one--wild, without shame. This is not a bride for a rabbi.

Who invented my life?

will you please explain how you can cry for a dead dog yet belong to a society of fanatics that urges death on human beings who happen to be Jews? Explain to me the logic of it.

So sleep now, without fear for your life, and if you should ever manage to get out of prison, keep in mind that the purpose of freedom is to create it for others.

His blood changed to falling snow.

Life, despite their frantic yoohooings, had passed them by.

Where a boy runs he never forgets.