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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.

Bernard Malamud

No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Across Anger Coal Hot
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 reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Ideas Reform Revision Work Writing
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
In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Ate Dream Success
A man had to learn, it was his nature.
BERNARD MALAMUD

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

Metaphor Sometimes Two
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
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.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Diminishing Humanity Small Some Withdraw
Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Boring Live Mode Writing
Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered-sometimes it seemed to take forever-went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Down Forever Hurt Obstacles Overnight
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.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Book Frivolous Leisure Matter
As long as a man stays alive he can’t tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Long Men Perseverance
Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Change Ears World
The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
BERNARD MALAMUD

Course Normal Steps
Politics isn’t in my nature.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Nature Politics Work
Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Circles Cutting Experts

Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.

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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.

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Popular Authors

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