Bernard Malamud

"We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness."

"Without heroes, we're all plain people, and don't know how far we can go."

"I don't think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own."

"Levin wanted friendship and got friendliness; he wanted steak and they offered spam."

"If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you."

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

"… keep in mind that the purpose of freedom is to create it for others."

"There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to – if there are no doors or windows – he walks through a wall."

"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."

"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."

"If your train's on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station."

"Those who write about life, reflect about life…. you see in others who you are."

"Life is a tragedy full of joy."

"It was all those biographies in me yelling, “We want out. We want to tell you what we’ve done to you.”"

"If I may, I would at this point urge young writers not to be too much concerned with the vagaries of the marketplace. Not everyone can make a first-rate living as a writer, but a writer who is serious and responsible about his work, and life, will probably find a way to earn a decent living, if he or she writes well. A good writer will be strengthened by his good writing at a time, let us say, of the resurgence of ignorance in our culture. I think I have been saying that the writer must never compromise with what is best in him in a world defined as free."

"I have written almost all my life. My writing has drawn, out of a reluctant soul, a measure of astonishment at the nature of life. And the more I wrote well, the better I felt I had to write. In writing I had to say what had happened to me, yet present it as though it had been magically revealed. I began to write seriously when I had taught myself the discipline necessary to achieve what I wanted. When I touched that time, my words announced themselves to me. I have given my life to writing without regret, except when I consider what in my work I might have done better. I wanted my writing to be as good as it must be, and on the whole I think it is. I would write a book, or a short story, 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. 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 re-form it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing: The men and things of today are wont to lie fairer and truer in tomorrow's meadow, Henry Thoreau said. I don't regret the years I put into my work. Perhaps I regret the fact that I was not two men, one who could live a full life apart from writing; and one who lived in art, exploring all he had to experience and know how to make his work right; yet not regretting that he had put his life into the art of perfecting the work."

"Bernard Malamud was like a second father to [my husband] Clark and me: he was Clark's teacher and when I got married that event also meant our friendship. I loved his writing but I didn't think it had anything to do with my own literary vision, with my world, until I had a very low moment in my life, in 1984. I had then very little money left because of a racist wave in Canada, I was not allowed there any more and legally I could not even have a job; and I was sitting in the kitchen reading Bernard Malamud's Selected Stories (1983) that the writer had sent me himself and suddenly, out of my self-despair, I said, "My God, he is writing about the Jewish community, about their attempts to accommodate to and assimilate American culture or about their failing to do so, which is precisely what I want to write about my own community." And that was my inspiration, in a way, for Darkness (1985), my first collection of stories."

"(Which authors do you think your writing most closely resembles?) Mukherjee: I see a strong likeness between my writing and Bernard Malamud's, in spite of the fact that he describes the lives of East European Jewish immigrants and I talk about the lives of newcomers from the Third World. Like Malamud, I write about a minority community which escapes the ghetto and adapts itself to the patterns of the dominant American culture. Like Malamud's, my work seems to find quite naturally a moral center...Malamud most of all speaks to me as a writer and I admire his work a great deal. Immersing myself in his work gave me the self-confidence to write about my own community."