Bernard Malamud

Novelist

1914-04-26 – 1986-03-18

Bernard Malamud was an American novelist and short story writer. He was a major twentieth-century American Jewish author and won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Fixer. His works include The Natural and many acclaimed short stories.

Quotes by Bernard Malamud

Where to look if you've lost your mind?
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When I don't feel hurt, I hope they bury me.
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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.
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The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself., September 14, 1958)
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Where to look if you've lost your mind?
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When I don't feel hurt, I hope they bury me.
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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.
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The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself., September 14, 1958)
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A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
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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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All my life I wanted to accomplish something worthwhile-a thing people will say took a little something ...
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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?
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No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.
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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.
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We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.
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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.
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Even at her loneliest she liked being among books, although she was sometimes depressed to see how much there was to read that she hadn't.
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No one had written a good long life of Schubert. He had lived long in music and short in life.
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They were together now in the vault under the tombstone; their ashes were, with the remains of those of their children who were not buried elsewhere, although all their names were incised on the stone.
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(Clothes) cannot change a man's nature. He's either kind or he isn't, with or without clothes.
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