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You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.

Bernard Malamud

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Teaching Uncertainty Writing
First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Draft Firsts Learn Stories
The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
BERNARD MALAMUD

Pages Self Stories
You can’t eat language but it eases thirst.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Ease Language Thirst
I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Afterthought Flower Language
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.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Cracks Eventually Mystery Real Track
It was all those biographies in me yelling, ‘We want out. We want to tell you what we’ve done to you.’
BERNARD MALAMUD

Biography Done Want Yelling
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.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Diversity Justice Know Learn Men
When I don’t feel hurt, I hope they bury me.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Bury Feels Hope Hurt
I fix what’s broken – except in the heart.
BERNARD MALAMUD

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

Sadness Tragedy Wine
We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Life Live Suffering Two
If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Stations Track Train
Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Happiness Plus Space
I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Knowledge Littles Sometime
The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Accept Book Imperfect Uncertain Until

You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.

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You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.

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Popular Authors

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