Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamudwas an American novelist and short story writer. Along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer, about antisemitism in Tsarist Russia, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 April 1914
CountryUnited States of America
Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.
I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
I don't think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
Writers who can't invent stories often substitute style for narrative. They remind me of the painter who couldn't paint people, so he painted chairs.
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.
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.
A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
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.
If you don't hear His voice so let Him hear yours. When prayers go up blessings descend.
For misery don't blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.
We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.
As long as a man stays alive he can't tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.
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.