Bernard Malamud Quotes

The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was. Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.

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

Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.

I think I said ‘All men are Jews except they don’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.

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.

‘Mourning is a hard business,’ Cesare said. ‘If people knew there’d be less death.’