Top 80 Bernard Malamud Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.”

— Bernard Malamud

2. “Without heroes, we are all plain people and don’t know how far we can go.”

— Bernard Malamud

3. “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.”

— Bernard Malamud

4. “There are no wrong books. What’s wrong is the fear of them.”

— Bernard Malamud

5. “The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.”

— Bernard Malamud

6. “For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.”

— Bernard Malamud

7. “In a sick country every step to health is an insult to those who live on its sickness.”

— Bernard Malamud

8. “If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you.”

— Bernard Malamud

9. “I fix what’s broken – except in the heart.”

— Bernard Malamud

10. “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

11. “Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.”

— Bernard Malamud

12. “Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.”

— Bernard Malamud

13. “All men are Jews, though few men know it.”

— Bernard Malamud

14. “Where to look if you’ve lost your mind?”

— Bernard Malamud

15. “Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.”

— Bernard Malamud

16. “I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.”

— Bernard Malamud

17. “Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.”

— Bernard Malamud

18. “Nationality isn’t soul...”

— Bernard Malamud

19. “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

20. “Politics isn’t in my nature.”

— Bernard Malamud

21. “First drafts are for learning what your story is about.”

— Bernard Malamud

22. “L’idea che qualunque cosa facesse si dovesse trasformare in un evento irrimediabile, gli dava un senso disperato di frustrazione.”

— Bernard Malamud

23. “We have two lives; the one we learn with and the one after that.”

— Bernard Malamud

24. “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

25. “Life is a tragedy full of joy.”

— Bernard Malamud

26. “Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.”

— Bernard Malamud

27. “Some men are by nature explorers; my nature is to stay under the same moon and stars, and if the weather is wet, under the same roof. It’s a strange world, why make it stranger?”

— Bernard Malamud

28. “Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.”

— Bernard Malamud

29. “His blood changed to falling snow.”

— Bernard Malamud

30. “No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.”

— Bernard Malamud

31. “The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.”

— Bernard Malamud

32. “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

33. “One’s fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.”

— Bernard Malamud

34. “What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.”

— Bernard Malamud

35. “Write your heart out.”

— Bernard Malamud

36. “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.”

— Bernard Malamud

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

— Bernard Malamud

38. “Being born a Jew meant being vulnerable to history, including its worst errors. Accident and history had involved Yakov Bok as he had never dreamed he could be involved. The involvement was, in a way of speaking, impersonal, but the effect, his misery and suffering, were not. The suffering was personal, painful, and possibly endless.”

— Bernard Malamud

39. “I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.”

— Bernard Malamud

40. “Leo hurried up to bed and hid under the covers. Under the covers he thought his life through. Although he soon fell asleep he could not sleep her out of his mind. He woke, beating his breast. Though he prayed to be rid of her, his prayers went unanswered. Through days of torment he endlessly struggled not to love her; fearing success, he escaped it. He then concluded to convert her to goodness, himself to God. The idea alternately nauseated and exalted him.”

— Bernard Malamud

41. “When I don’t feel hurt, I hope they bury me.”

— Bernard Malamud

42. “We can’t all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.”

— Bernard Malamud

43. “You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.”

— Bernard Malamud

44. “I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.”

— Bernard Malamud

45. “All my life I wanted to accomplish something worthwhile-a thing people will say took a little something...”

— Bernard Malamud

46. “We didn’t starve, but we didn’t eat chicken unless we were sick, or the chicken was.”

— Bernard Malamud

47. “I don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.”

— Bernard Malamud

48. “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

49. “The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.”

— Bernard Malamud

50. “Wonderboy flashed in the sun. It caught the sphere where it was biggest. A noise like a twenty-one gun salute cracked the sky. There was a straining, ripping sound and a few drops of rain spattered to the ground. The ball screamed toward the pitcher and seemed suddenly to dive down at his feet. He grabbed it to throw to first and realized to his horror that he held only the cover. The rest of it, unraveling cotton thread as it rode, was headed into the outfield.”

— Bernard Malamud